Bug#3013: elvis is too granular and has short description
Bill Mitchell writes ("Re: Bug#3013: elvis is too granular and has short description"):
...
> 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.
Indeed, I can see this user's point of view. However, we have to
trade off this user's disk space against the time and disk space
involved in having another package in the distribution. The x11
vs. nox packages were generally very confusing to users, which is one
of the reasons they were phased out, and they made selection of which
packages to install much more complicated than the current situation
(which essentially involves having one redundant library).
Remember that almost all Linux systems nowadays have Emacs installed,
(however much you may hate it (-:) and that our Emacs requires xlib
anyway.
You only save the overhead by having two versions of elvis if you have
*no* other optionally-X-based programs on the system.
I think that a better thing to do, rather than splitting the elvis
package into two parts, would be to produce a stub X11 library that
could be installed in place of the `real' xlib.
> [ctags and emacs]
>
> 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.
That's great, thanks.
Ian.
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