This was discussed about two years ago but no action was taken.
The proposal is simple:
- Drop the vi package from the repos
- Add vim-minimal to the installation image
This seems like a good idea because the vi editor we ship is about 10
years old and it has never behaved correctly for me.
It was brought up that some applications hardcode vi as their fallback
editor, but I think it should be up to the user to configure proper
EDITOR or VISUAL environment variables. During installation, none of
these programs needs to launch an editor (perhaps with the exception
of visudo which I can configure to search for vim). [1]
I did a test ISO build replacing vi with vim-minimal and the image
size increased by about 15 MiB.
If there are no objections until mid-April, I suggest we implement
this in the May snapshot.
[1] https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/2013-January/024357.h…