Alan McKinnon wrote:
> I agree, a sysadmin should know vi{,m} because their are many cases
> where it is required.
These days vi is almost never actually “required”. It turns out that when I
type “crontab” as root on my all-defaults Debian Jessie system, it's not
vi{,m} that comes up – and people could always type “EDITOR=nano crontab” if
it did. Having said that, a little vi knowledge never hurt anybody – it's just
that for the purposes of the exam we should limit this to the barest minimum
that is still reasonable, instead of having a fat “know vi” objective that
just makes people's heads spin for no discernible extra benefit.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, as far as I'm concerned it is
completely sufficient from an exam POV to require knowledge of vi's basic
movement commands (hjkl and/or cursor keys), i, x, dd, y and j, possibly /,
and ZZ. This is what you need as a sysadmin in order to change a few lines in
a configuration file, and can be conveniently learned and practiced by
spending 20 minutes with “vimtutor” while the instructor is having a cup of
coffee and checking their e-mail. It is also considerably less than what is
currently stipulated by objective 103.8, and that objective could then easily
be downgraded from 3 to 2 weight points (or even 1) to free up desperately
needed questions for use elsewhere.
If people really want to use vi to write the Great American Novel or the next
free operating system kernel, they remain perfectly free to find out as much
about it as they desire outside of LPIC-1 prep. But we shouldn't waste the
precious time of people who prefer other, more intuitive and up-to-date
editors for their day-to-day work by forcing them to learn loads of vi arcana
that are otherwise completely useless to them. Nor should we pretend to them
that vi is the only worthwhile editor in existence and that everyone should be
using it for everything.
Anselm
--
Anselm Lingnau … Linup Front GmbH (MAX21) … Linux- & Open-Source-Schulungen
[email protected], +49(0)6151-9067-0, Fax -299, www.linupfront.de
Robert-Koch-Str. 9, 64331 Weiterstadt Post: Postf. 100121, 64201 Darmstadt DE
Sitz: Weiterstadt (AG Darmstadt, HRB7705) Geschf: Oliver Michel, Nils Manegold
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