[arch-dev-public] Dropping vi and adding vim-minimal to the installation image

[Evangelos Foutras]

On 21/04/15 16:27, Allan McRae wrote:
> What happened to adding a symlink?  Now there is no "vi" in base, many
> packages there are broken out of the box - sudo (visudo), bash
> (bashbug), less (when pressing v).  There is bound to be more...
> 
> Or are we having all those packages depend on vim?

td;dr: No symlink; instead, let's configure those programs to use nano.

During the previous discussion, Alexander posted a list of applications
that depend on vi. [1]

Based on that list, the following packages can be configured at compile
time to use an editor other than vi:

  sudo  less  util-linux  shadow

It's not mentioned on the list, but cronie also accepts a ./configure
flag to set the default editor.

The remaining use cases seem small enough that relying on VISUAL/EDITOR
for those doesn't sound too bad.

The real question is, what do we set the default editor to; nano (in
[core] and part of the base group so it gets installed by default) or
vim (highly preferred choice for some people, but not in [core])?

What we are looking for here is a sane default, so nano seems like the
better choice. If nobody complains too loudly, I'll switch sudo, less,
util-linux, shadow and cronie to use nano by default in a couple of days.

[1]
https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/2013-January/024357.html