Re: Bug#954075: busybox: provide a low-priority alternative for vi, view, editor
Hi Simon!
On 3/16/20 12:31 PM, Simon McVittie wrote:
> Steps to reproduce:
>
> - Install a chroot/container
> - Install busybox
>
> Expected results:
>
> - If a more fully-featured vi is installed (vim, vim-*, nvi, etc.) then it
> provides the vi and view commands in PATH
> - Otherwise, "vi foo.txt" runs busybox vi
> - Ideally, "view foo.txt" would be equivalent to "busybox vi -R foo.txt"
> (but this might require a two-line shell script wrapper or busybox code
> changes to recognise view as a command, rather than just a symlink)
>
> - If a more fully-featured editor is installed (one of the above, or a non-vi
> editor like nano, emacs etc.) then it provides the editor command in PATH
> - Otherwise, "editor foo.txt" runs busybox vi
>
> Actual result:
>
> - If a more fully-featured editor is installed, we get the expected result
> - Otherwise, vi, view and editor are unimplemented, even though busybox could
> implement them
>
> For editor, busybox vi should probably be a higher priority than ed, but
> a lower priority than any non-minimal editor.
>
> For vi, busybox vi should probably be a lower priority than any
> separately-installed vi implementation, on the basis that if you installed
> nvi or elvis-tiny or something, it's probably because you wanted to use it.
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.
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.
Thanks,
Adrian
> [1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2020/03/msg00246.html
--
.''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' : Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
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