Re: Experiment: poll on "switching to vim-tiny for standard vi?"

[Steve Greenland <steveg@moregruel.net>]

On 03-Jan-06, 19:30 (CST), Steve Langasek <vorlon@debian.org> wrote: 
> On Tue, Jan 03, 2006 at 08:58:49AM -0600, Steve Greenland wrote:
> > Such behaviour is pretty much standard alternative handling: the default
> > install is the lowest priority, and the optional variants have higher
> > priorities.
> 
> > For a single user system, this makes sense. For a multi-user system,
> > where the admin might want all of (vim, nvi, vile, whatever) as options
> > for the user, it's easy to pick whichever one you want for the default.
> 
> OTOH, the admin may not understand the alternatives system, or recognize its
> relevance at the time of installing the package (worst case, some other
> package pulls it in automatically), which makes for an inconsistent user
> experience.
> 
> I think the single-user system is the last one that alternatives handling
> should optimize for, since the *one* person who's going to know to type
> "nvi" instead of "vi", and the one person who can fix the alternatives if he
> doesn't like them, is the admin...

Then you need to bring this up on -policy, because what I described
(that the default package providing an alternative is the lowest
ranked one, and the optional ones override it) is what people have
been doing for years. See, for example, mawk and gawk. Or even vi: by
your argument, nvi should currently be the highest ranked of the vi
alternatives, not the lowest.

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