On Tue, Jan 03, 2006 at 08:58:49AM -0600, Steve Greenland wrote: > On 03-Jan-06, 00:46 (CST), Steve Langasek <vorlon@debian.org> wrote: > > On Mon, Jan 02, 2006 at 11:47:05AM -0600, Steve Greenland wrote: > > > If you agree with the change, do Stefano and I need to do anything > > > other than swap vi alternative priorities and swap important<->optional > > > priorities? > > Why swap the vi alternative priorities? > Because if vim is the default, and someone deliberately installs nvi, > the presumption is that they prefer nvi, and thus it should grab the vi > link. I think that's a pretty bad presumption; to me, it indicates that *someone* on the system prefers nvi and has requested its installation, but this doesn't mean it's the preference of either the system administrator or of the majority of the users. > Such behaviour is pretty much standard alternative handling: the default > install is the lowest priority, and the optional variants have higher > priorities. > For a single user system, this makes sense. For a multi-user system, > where the admin might want all of (vim, nvi, vile, whatever) as options > for the user, it's easy to pick whichever one you want for the default. OTOH, the admin may not understand the alternatives system, or recognize its relevance at the time of installing the package (worst case, some other package pulls it in automatically), which makes for an inconsistent user experience. I think the single-user system is the last one that alternatives handling should optimize for, since the *one* person who's going to know to type "nvi" instead of "vi", and the one person who can fix the alternatives if he doesn't like them, is the admin... -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. vorlon@debian.org http://www.debian.org/
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