Re: ae's vi attempt on boot disks stomps on real vi symlink
miquels@cistron.nl (Miquel van Smoorenburg) writes:
> In article <[🔎] 19970507003029.681.qmail@palm.hands.com>,
> Philip Hands <phil@hands.com> wrote:
> >Hi,
> >
> >IMHO we were better of without this. I'd rather have a script saying:
> >
> > vi doesn't fit on the boot disks, you'll have to put up with "ae"
> > for the install.
> >
> >The emulation is not close enough to real vi to make it worthwhile.
>
> They always say "vi" is too big. I just recompiled elvis-1.4 in
> small mode (for Minix, originally)
>
> $ ll elvis
> -rwxr-xr-x 1 miquels staff 67352 May 8 21:48 elvis*
>
> And this is a _real_ vi! Do we have 66K left on the boot disks? Please?
We should make clear what we are talking about:
The current Debian Installation system consists of a rescue disk, a
driver disk and the base disks. The rescue disk has the kernel and the
installation root (gzipped).
So there are two places that contain ae: The root and the base disks.
On the root every byte counts, hence elvis is too bloated. And in
normal operation no editor is needed there. It is only needed when
some bug gets into operation or when the Rescue Disk is used to fix
some problem on an already installed system.
The base disks aren't that space-critical. Currently 211968 byte
(gzipped) are free, but other parts of base might grow so I hesitate
to burn this for a vi.
The base systems usually contains completely installed Debian
packages, so the needed space is approximately the size of the
original Debian package archive. The sizes for the vi variants are:
- elvis 284228
- nvi 175986
- vim 499600
So nvi is the smallest and currently would fit without requiring an
additional disk (and it is the one and _real_ vi ;-) . But some day
another floppy will be needed, and this might be due to vi, so the
questions remains: Is it worth the price?
When the base system is installed dselect is called; and by default
nvi is selected. So after doing the initial package installation via
dselect a _real_ vi is available. Normally no editor is needed until
this dselect run is finished, so I think it isn't necessary to provide
a vi in the base system.
Sven
--
Sven Rudolph <sr1@inf.tu-dresden.de> ; WWW : http://www.sax.de/~sr1/
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