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

[Daemon]

I think a better question is, are the extra features of vim-minimal worth
that 15MB size increase?

While I completely agree on vi's inadequacies (it's a unmaintained mess;
I'm rewriting it casually).

Despite vi being a legacy codebase littered with #IF PDP11 HURR DURR'S, for
now IMO it should stay,
with its days limited.

IMO, if truly necessary to replace vi, wait a few months until I rewrite
it, stripping it's allocator,
print function, terminal interaction library, other odd terminal code, half
of the bloody useless commands, etc.

After the rewrite in C99, it'll be ported to Rust.


2015-03-30 0:04 GMT-07:00 Christian Hesse <list at eworm.de>:

> Gerardo Exequiel Pozzi <vmlinuz386 at gmail.com> on Sun, 2015/03/29 14:18:
> > On 03/29/2015 12:15 PM, Evangelos Foutras wrote:
> > > 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.html
> > >
> >
> > +1 for me.
>
> And another +1 for me!
> --
> main(a){char*c=/*    Schoene Gruesse                         */"B?IJj;MEH"
> "CX:;",b;for(a/*    Chris           get my mail address:    */=0;b=c[a++];)
> putchar(b-1/(/*               gcc -o sig sig.c && ./sig
> */b/42*2-3)*42);}
>