Package: ed Version: any The priority of the ed package has been changed to "optional". According to the changelog this is apparently for no reason other than a response to bug #416585, the content of which is simply one person's suggestion which he makes without providing any justification beyond his personal whim.
The Debian policy manual http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-archive.html#s-priorities says: "If the expectation is that an experienced Unix person who found it missing would say "What on earth is going on, where is foo?", it must be an important package." Surely it is beyond question that this applies to ed. Anyone needing to edit a file via a simple line-oriented interface on a Unix-like system will automatically reach for ed and will be most disconcerted to find it missing. And certainly ed used to have priority "important" as this suggests it should. The assertion in bug #416585 that "anyone who wants it can easily install it" is not true. The principal value of ed is that it is an editor which works when nothing else does. If the system is broken, or incompletely installed, or only accessible via the most primitive of interfaces, or in other situations of a like kind, which are the sort of situations in which ed or an equivalent is likely to be the only editor that is usable at all, it is also highly likely that installing ed (or anything else for that matter) will be impossible. And the lack of a functional editor makes it many times harder to fix whatever problem has given rise to the need for it. I have recently been caught this way a couple of times myself. In one case I was able to copy /bin/ed from another system onto a USB stick and use that. In another I had to use yucky workarounds like sed -i -e 'editing commands' 'filename'. Another virtue of ed is that it is possible to use it to patch binaries without the risk that arises with less primitive editors of some automatic formatting function messing the whole thing up. For instance if a hard-coded pathname is causing problems then ed is capable of changing it to something else of the same or shorter length with no collateral damage. The kind of situation in which such a problem is likely to arise is also the kind of situation in which editing the source and recompiling is likely to be impossible. In short, not only is it a policy violation for ed to have priority "optional", it also means that an important repair and rescue tool is likely to be unavailable when it is most needed. Therefore I strongly suggest that the priority for ed be reset to "important". -- Pigeon Be kind to pigeons - - Pigeon's Nest: http://pigeonsnest.co.uk/ GPG key: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x21C61F7F
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