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Re: Bug#954075: busybox: provide a low-priority alternative for vi, view, editor



On 3/17/20 10:38 AM, Simon McVittie wrote:
> On Tue, 17 Mar 2020 at 09:13:33 +0100, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
>> I think enabling vi in the busybox configuration is actually the best approach
>> to address this problem as this way we continue to ship vi with debian-installer
>> and at the same time get rid of the vim dependency which is regularly causing
>> headaches when building debian-installer images for Debian Ports.
> 
> I think you're mixing up the mostly-udeb-based system that *runs* d-i
> with the deb-based system that *is installed by* d-i, and I think you're
> mixing up enabling the vi applet with making it available as the 'vi'
> command in PATH.

Right. But that doesn't change the fact that I still think the idea is
sensible to fix the installation issue in d-i.

> The vi applet is already enabled in the ordinary and static .deb packages:
> after "apt install busybox" or "apt install busybox-static", you can run
> "busybox vi example.txt" to get a basic vi-compatible editor. It's a less
> fully-featured vi than you're probably used to (in particular there is
> no undo!) but it works.

vim-tiny isn't a fully-featured vim either, is it?

> If you want busybox vi to be available in the default system installed
> by d-i or debootstrap, then that's a separate feature request, for which
> you would need to ask the ftp team to raise the Priority of busybox from
> optional to important.
> 
> If you want busybox vi to provide a vi command in the default system
> installed by d-i or debootstrap, then you need the alternatives to be set
> up (#954075), *and* you need the ftp team to raise the Priority of the
> package (and probably lower the Priority of vim-tiny at the same time).

OK.

> If you want busybox vi to be available in the shell while d-i is running,
> then that's a different separate feature request, for enabling vi in
> the busybox *udeb* (debian/config/pkg/udeb). At the moment the busybox
> udeb doesn't enable CONFIG_VI, and the only visual text editor with a
> udeb seems to be nano-udeb. (vim, nvi, elvis don't produce udebs either,
> so there is no vi(1) in the d-i environment, and that isn't a regression.)

I really only care about fixing this issue so that I don't have to build
vim manually on half a dozen architectures with the testsuite disabled
just to be able to build usable debian-installer images.

Thanks,
Adrian

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
  `-    GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913


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