Re: RFC: Replacing vim-tiny with nano in essential packages
On 3/17/20 9:49 AM, Ansgar wrote:
> John Paul Adrian Glaubitz writes:
>> And I assume, once we have fixed vim everywhere, it will be broken again
>> at some point due to the fact vim upstream is continuously adding features
>> which is why it's no longer suitable being an editor to be shipped in a
>> minimal installation.
>
> And Debian ships vim-tiny, not vim, as part of the minimal
> installation. That the same source package also builds other versions
> doesn't really matter for vim-tiny.
>
> The only problem you mentioned was vim-tiny (arch: any) depending on
> vim-common (arch: all) and these sometimes getting out of sync on Debian
> Ports. I don't think that is a good reason to switch editors and there
> are other ways to work around that problem.
So, are you going to fix the testsuite failures then? I don't think it's
fair to downplay problems and then not be willing to provide any possible
solutions to it.
And the issue with vim-common being out of sync is not trivially fixable
with Debian Ports as we don't have the cruft feature that DAK has.
Unless someone actually goes ahead and fixes the problem, it will continue
to exist which is why I made this suggestion. And with even the maintainer
of the vim package saying that he would like to get rid of vim-tiny, I don't
think you have a strong argument in this discussion.
After all, anyone wanting to use a particular editor can just install it,
for anyone else, a basic version of vi and nano are enough when boooting
a rescue system. You are not going to work on software projects with a
minimal system or a rescue environment, are you? Most likely, you are
using the editors in d-i to fix an entry in /etc/fstab or the GRUB
configuration.
> But if we really wanted a minimal editor: `ed` is still there with an
> Installed-Size: 116 kB and no external dependencies besides libc6. It
> also works without fancy terminal features.
It isn't about the size of the package. It's about src:vim constantly
failing to build from source and no one stepping up to fix these
problems. And I don't really see a point in using a fully fledged
version of vim in a minimal environment when simple alternatives
exist.
Adrian
--
.''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' : Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
`- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
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