Re: What is the "editor" virtual package for?
On 19-Apr-04, 10:07 (CDT), Mark Brown <broonie@sirena.org.uk> wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 19, 2004 at 08:57:18AM -0500, Steve Greenland wrote:
>
> > As a practical matter, under any reasonable definition of "provided
> > functionality", several 10s of packages could provide editor, and
> > several 100s could "Suggest:" it, but I can't think of any that
> > legitimately "Depend:" on it.
>
> There are programs like mutt which rely on having an external editor
> avaliable at runtime for critical functionality.
$ apt-cache show mutt
[*snip*]
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.2.4-4), libncurses5 (>= 5.2.20020112a-1), libsasl7, exim | mail-transport-agent
Recommends: mime-support
Suggests: locales, urlview, ispell, gnutls3, gnupg | pgp | pgp5i, gnutls3
[*snip*]
Apparently not.
Mutt's need is solved by /usr/bin/sensible-editor, the /usr/bin/editor
alternative, and by making it fairly hard to have all the packages
providing that alternative removed (i.e. nano and nvi are Priority
"important").
Look, I'm not claiming that certain packages don't need an editor, I'm
claiming that the "editor" virtual package is useless. The need for
a text editor on a Unix system is so prevalent that calling it out
specifically is pointless. In the case where someone has made the very
specific effort to remove all text editors, I don't think they are going
to appreciate packages depending on "editor".
I'll further illustrate the pointlessness of the virtual package
"editor": The only two packages that reference "editor" are udo-doc and
udo-doc-ger, and it's a "Suggests".
--
Steve Greenland
The irony is that Bill Gates claims to be making a stable operating
system and Linus Torvalds claims to be trying to take over the
world. -- seen on the net
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