On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 10:45:56AM +0100, Colin Watson wrote: > https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/vim/+bug/372364 requests that > vim-tiny be available on the root filesystem as a rescue utility. I have > some sympathy with this: a separate /usr is more likely to be used by at > least moderately experienced users rather than complete novices, and if > /usr fails to mount they may well be more comfortable with vi than nano.
This was actually one of the intended features of the vim-tiny package, but that seems to have been forgotten or lost along the way. > I'm aware that alternatives handling is rather delicate, though, > especially in Debian where the vim-tiny package also needs to support > the Hurd with /usr symlinked to /, so I thought I'd just pass this on to > you as a wishlist request. Thanks for mentioning the Hurd consideration. That's not something I would have remembered. At first glance, though, this shouldn't be a problem as only one vi alternative will be in effect at once regardless of whether it is under /bin or /usr/bin. > We probably can't assume either that /bin is in front of /usr/bin on > $PATH or the other way round, so some care would be needed. What if vim > is installed so /usr/bin/vi is a symlink to /usr/bin/vim.basic, which > isn't on /? We wouldn't want /bin/vi to be vim.tiny despite that, since > that could produce inconsistent results when typing 'vi' in a normal > environment. Maybe a sensible approach would be to move vim.tiny to > /bin, but not worry about providing a /bin/vi symlink - people can just > type vim.tiny if they're in a recovery situation. I think providing the vi alternative is still fine. If they've configured some other Vim package to provide it, though, they'll need to invoke vim.tiny directly in a recovery situation. When vim-tiny is providing the alternative then everything will Just Work as the alternative will be in /bin. > In a recovery situation, it probably doesn't matter much that > /usr/share/vim/ (including /usr/share/vim/vimrc.tiny) would be > unavailable. Agreed. -- James GPG Key: 1024D/61326D40 2003-09-02 James Vega <[email protected]>
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