On 22/04/15 02:57, Allan McRae wrote: > On 22/04/15 08:55, Evangelos Foutras wrote: >> By the way, it's worth noting that vim-minimal has a footprint of about >> 30 MiB. It's not much, but compared to nano's 2 MiB, it's way larger. >> >> I'm probably repeating what I've written in my previous posts, but to me >> the cleanest implementation is to have one tiny editor in [core] as part >> of the base installation (nano), and use that as the fallack for the >> five or so programs that used to default to vi. >> >> Adding a second, much larger, editor in [core] and base (vim) just so >> that it can be made the default fallback, seems kind of unnecessary. >> > > If nano was not in base, what do you think the install proportion would be? > > This is mainly for consistency. I could not find another distribution > where visudo does not call /usr/bin/vi by default (and I saw that > provided by vim-minimal a lot).
We're faced with the dilemma of which editor to use as a fallback for a handful of applications. I shouldn't have used the term "default" as it can be incorrectly interpreted as "We're changing the default editor". Yes, we could certainly move vim-minimal to [core]. The downsides would be 1) a 30 MiB increase in the size of the standard installation and 2) having to maintain a package across two repositories. Both are somewhat minor issues, of course. While I prefer and do use vim myself, the extra complexity introduced by maintaining a second editor in [core] isn't justified, considering one can simply install vim, specify set VISUAL=vim and delete nano if they wish. I feel a stronger case would need to be made for moving vim-minimal to [core]. At the moment we're only trying to figure out a sane fallback editor, mostly for visudo and I guess cronie's crontab. nano seems to fit the bill and requires no additional packages in [core] or base. (The fact that visudo has 'vi' in its name isn't a valid argument. :P)
