[arch-dev-public] [arch-general] Drop VI from [core] (was Re: Winter Cleanup of [community])

[Allan McRae]

On 26/01/13 00:18, Pierre Schmitz wrote:
> Am 24.01.2013 17:35, schrieb Dave Reisner:
>> More seriously, POSIX says vi is optional for us:
>>
>> http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/vi.html
>>
>> Please remember that dropping it from [core] makes it in no way any less
>> available.
>>
>> I've no problems with moving vi as long as it doesn't disappear from the
>> install media. It's useful to have around long enough until you can pacman
>> -S vim.
> 
> If vi is removed from base/core we need to make sure that we don't
> break other packages. E.g. some programs use vi as default or fallback
> to it if EDITOR is not defined. E.g. visudo, crontab etc.

Sure, we would need to dd some optdepends.

> We once had vim as our vi implementation so I don't see any reason to
> repeat history here.

I took the history as the vi/vim/gvim all from various builds of vim did
not work and we wanted to build from a split package and gvim needs to
be in [extra] so there went vi.

Has anyone ever been particularly satisfied with the vi in [core]?  And
it is not particularly maintained.  There was a bug opened for about a
year with a patch that got added last bug day.  And the fact it needs
three patches shows upstream is slow.  I just checked and the last
release was 24 Mar 2005.

The point about the install iso increasing is size is valid...  but then
what proportion of people use it to install both an i686 and an x86_64
install?

Allan