[arch-dev-public] Vi package

[Stéphane Gaudreault]

Hi,

I was looking at FS#20778 and was wondering what we should do with it. 

While it is true that the "traditional vi" is buggy and not user friendly. It 
does not seems that BusyBox is a good alternative.

There are options here:

1) Statu quo
Pro : 
   * Support for multi-byte character encodings like UTF-8
   * Small size
Cons :
   * Did I said that it is buggy ?
   * Use of this old software in the installer may give a strange impression 
to new users as they are faced with an editor from the '70 on a distro where 
everything is up to date.
   * Appears to be no longer be updated upstream.

2) nvi
Pro :
   * Small size 
   * More advanced features : multiple undo, command history, filename 
completions, multiple edit buffers, etc.
   * Version of vi that is shipped with {Free,Open,Net,DragonFly}BSD
Cons :
   * No support for muti-byte character encoding
   * Appears to be no longer be updated

3) elvis
Pro :
   * Small size
   * Advanced features
   * Shipped with Slackware and Debian
Cons :
   * the editor has been abandoned upstream since about March 2004.
   * the Debian package has only an incomplete implementation of support for 
multi-byte characters

4) A compact version of vim
http://packages.ubuntu.com/en/maverick/vim-tiny
https://github.com/BlackIkeEagle/herecura/tree/master/herecura-stable/vim
Pro :
   * Most popular vi implementation
   * Advanced features
   * UTF-8 support
   * Avoid dependency on vim-runtime.
Cons :
   * Size : not as bloated as the full vim, but larger than ex/vi. On Ubuntu 
x86_64, installation size is 836 kB which is reasonable.
   * May need a duplicate PKGBUILD as vim is in [extra] while vi is in [core]

Opinions?

Stéphane