Re: switching to vim-tiny for standard vi?

[Steve Greenland <steveg@moregruel.net>]

On 19-Dec-05, 18:06 (CST), Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org> wrote: 
> I'd still like to know what Steve Greenland thinks of this, since he
> maintains nvi. I think that if the maintainers of vim and nvi agree to
> swap the one that is in base, that's their perogative to do now since
> the thread hasn't turned up any particular reasons not to do it.

I've been avoiding commenting on this, waiting to see what the
consensus is, if any. I was hoping that there would be a strong pull one
way or the other; that hasn't happened. My thoughts:

I'm still missing the incentive. Joey Hess wrote in his earlier message
that "It's now only marginally larger than nvi". It achieves that by
removing many of the features that distinguish vim from nvi, to the
point that my guess is that most of those who prefer vim will need to
install the full vim anyway, while those that prefer nvi will just fell
vaguely dissastified by the change. If the result of this is that a)
base is not smaller, and b) vim users still have to install vim-nottiny,
and c) nvi users now have to install nvi, I don't think it's a net win.

The defaults really need to be changed to match maximum nvi
compatibility. The problem, of course, is that when someone then
installs vim-full (or whatever it's called), they don't get the benefits
of the full vim feature set or standard vim behavior w/o modifying the
config. Someone noted that it was possible to get different behaviour
depending on whether vim was started with "vi" or "vim" - I think that's
probably a good idea, but it may not be enough. It's too bad that
dpkg-divert doesn't work with config files...

Another consideration is that vim-tiny would need to swap priorities on
the /usr/bin/vi (et. al.) alternative, so that if nvi is installed, it
becomes the standard vi. But that's more of a packaging detail between
myself and Stefano.

Steve
-- 
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