Re: Bug#954075: busybox: provide a low-priority alternative for vi, view, editor
On 3/28/20 5:16 PM, Cyril Brulebois wrote:
> John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de> (2020-03-17):
>> 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.
>
> Can you expand on that?
src:vim is regularly failing to build from source, even on release
architectures and I think that this is rather unfortunate for packages
that are required for even a minimal Debian installation.
Just the latest upload of src:vim is failing on ppc64el again:
> https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=vim&suite=sid
> https://buildd.debian.org/status/logs.php?pkg=vim&arch=ppc64el
>> It also seems that the maintainer of the vim package would like to
>> get rid of vim-tiny which he currently only ships because of
>> debian-installer [1].
>>
>> Switching the vi implementation in debian-installer from src:vim to
>> src:busybox would therefore make both parties happy, I would say.
>
> I'm not aware of vi playing any part in Debian Installer (there's nano
> instead) but maybe I've been missing some piece of information during
> all those years?
vim-tiny is always installed when debootstrap installs a minimal Debian
system and vim-tiny is built from src:vim.
My suggestion would be to replace the problematic vim-tiny with the
less problematic vile:
> https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=vile&suite=sid
> Digging a bit more in the mail you pointed to (and its references…),
> it seems you might be referring to the “Priority: important” field for
> vim-tiny. While this is indeed used in Debian Installer through
> debootstrap(-udeb), the former is not depending on anything provided
> by vim-tiny. We've had a number of packages having their priorities
> changed over the last release cycle(s), mainly initiated by Ansgar. I
> don't think vim-tiny is special here, and if the consensus is that it
> should no longer be “Priority: important”, I'm not immediately seeing
> reasons for the installer team to object.
I just want to avoid debian-installer to be dependent on a package
that has regularly quality issues and rather replace it with a simple
VI clone which will hopefully also take away pressure from the maintainer
of src:vim since he can remove vim-tiny (which he actually wants to)
and not bother about debootstrap or debian-installer if the package FTBFS
in unstable again.
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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