A little "research" on nvi given the vim-tiny issue
Russ A said [1] that nvi "is orphaned both upstream and in Debian". I
wanted to emphasize that fact by pointing out that Gentoo's removing
nvi for similar reasons, and trying to install it just now resulted in
this "package.mask" message:
$ sudo emerge -p nvi
# Michał Górny <mgorny@gentoo.org> (2020-02-17)
# Based on very old code needing a lot of patches. Minimal upstream
# activity since early 2011, last patches accepted in 2016. Multiple
# unresolved bugs. app-editors/vim[minimal] is the recommended
# replacement.
# Removal in 30 days. Bug #690102.
Arch uses "the traditional vi" [2], AFAICT, it was last released in
2005 and Arch has three patches for it.
Arch's AUR has nvi from [3] version 1.79 and nvi-multibyte-upstream
from [4] version 1.81.
The three BSDs use nvi as "/usr/bin/vi". The READMEs indicate that
FreeBSD has version 2.1.3, NetBSD has version 1.80, and OpenBSD has
version 1.79.
Version 1.81 has multibyte support and Debian and Gentoo use it.
FreeBSD's version 2.1.3 is the result of a GSoC to add
multibyte-encoding support [5]. That's when it jumped from 1.79 to
2.1.1.
[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2020/03/msg00243.html
[2] http://ex-vi.sourceforge.net/
[3] https://sites.google.com/a/bostic.com/keithbostic/vi/
[4] https://repo.or.cz/nvi.git
[5] https://github.com/lichray/nvi2
PS: Fedora's vim-minimal is vim configured using "--with-features=small".
PPS: Gentoo's vim[minimal] is vim configured using
"--with-features=tiny" like Debian's vim-tiny.
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