Bug#1882: elv-fmt is broken

[Bill Mitchell <mitchell@mdd.comm.mot.com>]

Chris Fearnley <cjf@netaxs.com>

> When I try to reformat a paragraph, with the command '!}fmt', in elvis,
> core is dumped.  When I do it in vim or nvi, I get garbage instead of a
> reformatted paragraph.  I tried reinstalling (and rebuilding the .deb
> package for) elv-fmt and the same effects were noted.

I'll look at this -- probably tonight.

> I had to re-install textutils in order to get a working /usr/bin/fmt.
> NB, the fmt in textutils seems to work with elvis, nvi, and vim.
> Is there any reason to have elv-fmt instead of the GNU fmt?  If there
> is some reason, then some note in elv-fmt's description (at least)
> should alert that textutils has another (possibly better) version of
> /usr/bin/fmt.

There was once a bug report against textutils fmt that it did a
buggy fmt -- sometimes producing very poor results.  elvis fmt did
a much better job in those cases.  I'm not sure of the current status
of that bug (and can't reach the web site to check at the moment).

> [Now that I purged elv-fmt, I notice that usr/doc/copyright/elvis has
> been deleted as well.  I had to re-install elv-vi in order to get the
> copyright notice back.  Well this might be a dpkg problem, I don't
> know.]

That's almost certainly my fault.  I'll look at that as well.

> This is with debian 0.93R6 + plus a few packages from 1.0 (but I
> haven't upgraded to ELF yet, so that's not it).

I'll upload an a.out package revision if I fix anything.  An
elf package will have to wait until elf ncurses is available
and stable.