Re: alternatives and priorities
On Friday 19 May 2006 10:25, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> Today, after upgrading my system, suddenly mcedit became the default
> editor, rather than vim as I expected it. Investigating showed that some
> funny guy decided that mcedit could use a priority of 100, whereas vim
> had fallen back to 60 since the latest upgrade.
>
> Fixing this wasn't very hard, but it made me consider why we let a
> maintainer decide what the alternative priority of an editor would be. I
> mean, if you maintain a package, you probably like the editor very much,
> probably more so than any of the other editors in Debian; so you're
> quite biased. This would mean you would be the worst person to make an
> objective choice as to what the best priority for your editor would be.
> Granted, for some things the Policy defines the amount of points you can
> add to your priority based on the features your program has, but it
> doesn't do so for everything (unless I've missed something), which means
> that it's not a definite solution. It's also not at all guaranteed that
> doing it this way is actually useful.
>
> So, instead of using static feature lists to define an application's
> priority with which it would be configured in the alternatives system,
> why not use popcon data to do that instead? Using popcon would ensure
> that the applications which most people prefer would be the default;
> this is a fair and objective criterion.
You would end up with nvi or nano as editors, since they are installed by
default. Probably more as viewer and so on.
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