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

[Jerome Leclanche]

On 21 April 2015 at 22:32, Evangelos Foutras <evangelos at foutrelis.com> wrote:
> 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

As long as the EDITOR variable is supported by those programs, maybe yes.
But I don't think creating a symlink *anyway* and make vim provide vi
is inappropriate.

J. Leclanche