Re: Guidelines
Charlie Brady said:
> [...]
> On the subject of default editors, I agree that vi is a bit unusual to
> throw at newbies as a default, but then so is emacs. pico is very easy to
> use, joe a little less so. What do people think of us making some effort
> to add code wherever necessary so that the default editor is set by an
> environment variable - VISUAL or EDITOR for instance? The editor of
> choice can then be set at install time, or adduser time.
Many packages already do this. My example for the CHANGES/README file thread
(less-177) uses the editor specified by the EDITOR environment variable. The
change to emacs (which, incidentally was made in pre-debain changes for linux
which were present in the source package I obtained from tsx-11; and which I've
decided to change back to vi since the man pages in the packages had not been
changed to match this code change), was the choice of default editor to use
in the event that the EDITOR environment variable is left unspecified.
On adding code to a package beyond what is necessary to make that package
run on linux, I think that's a case-by-case issue. For widely-used generic
packages (e.g., less, more, gcc, elvis, ...) , and for narrowly used packages
which have a clear central point of control (e.g., c2man, jgraph, ...),
It's best IMHO to work with the central maintainers to integrate bugfixes
and/or enhancements into the base package rather than spawning a maverick
version of the package.
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