Bug#3013: elvis is too granular and has short description
On Fri, 31 May 1996, Bruce Perens wrote:
>> Our general policy is not to have x and nox versions of things.
>
>I can confirm this. We broke the xlib package out of the rest of X
>so that we could install X-optional programs on non-X systems without
>the need for no-X versions of the packages.
I guess I missed that discussion.
>> Where have we articulated that policy?
>
>It was the consensus of the group some time ago when we made this change.
>It belongs in the develper guidelines.
>
>> In any case, I disagree with it in this case. I intend to continue to
>> offer both the X11 and non-X11 versions of elvis.
>
>Aw com'on. It's the only X and no-X package pair left in the entirety of
>Debian. All of the rest are gone as far as I can tell.
>
>> The distribution maintainers can choose to reject the offered packages
>> if they so desire.
>
>Lighten up. We're not going to reject the packages, but we might attempt
>to convince you that one of them is redundant.
I'll think about it. However, I can easily imagine user system
where the user does not wish to run X11, wants a vi editor, and
prefers elvis. I've been in that precise situation myself. In
such a situation, installing a 230 Kb elvisx11 executable seems
preferable to installing 1.7 Mb of otherwise unneeded files from
the xlib just package just in order to be able to install and run
the 255 Kb elvisx11 executable without using any of its x11
functionality.
Sorry about the abrupt tone. I've been rushing replies to email
out over the last several days in batches of 30 messages or so
during 15 minute email-check breaks. This particular response got
squeezed out during one of those short breaks.
>[...]
>Is Ian still maintaining Emacs? I think it's a good idea to not have
>editors conflict because of ctags. I think we should just make up one
>definitive version of ctags and have the editor packages not install their
>own versions.
He's not. I got that info from the Maintainer field of the emacs package
I had installed. There's been a recent maintainer change, and I'm now
in contact with the new maintainer via email. I expect that we'll quickly
agree on an approach to resolve this long-standing conflict over ctags
between the elvis and emacs packages.
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