Bug#197835: [PROPOSAL]: integrated environments are allowed
On Wed, 2003-06-18 at 05:00, Colin Watson wrote:
> [As Joey said recently in another discussion, please follow up to the
> bug, not to debian-policy.]
Yeah, sorry, I have a habit of just hitting Reply To List.
> On Wed, Jun 18, 2003 at 01:02:37AM -0400, Colin Walters wrote:
> *I* have very good reasons to prefer a particular editor, namely that I
> can use it with great facility and by and large find other editors
> uncomfortable and inflexible. Policy has this provision for a reason.
Sure.
> If the editor is actually part of the other program, such as editing a
> text area in a web form directly in Mozilla, then I'd be willing to make
> an exception, but not otherwise.
Again, I think one should think for this purpose of an integrated
environment mainly all as one program. And especially with component
embedding (which will become much more prevalent over time), the
distinction becomes quite blurred.
> "Use integrated environment's editor"
> should be an option defaulting to off: note that newbies will not have
> $EDITOR set at all so this won't affect them, and many other people may
> choose to set $EDITOR in a context that doesn't apply to their whole X
> session so that programs launched from a window manager menu don't see
> it. This is fine.
Yes, what we are discussing will not affect newbies. But I imagine a
lot of experienced users have EDITOR and especially PAGER set
consistently, and this will affect them.
> I honestly think that the status quo is broken, and therefore don't like
> the idea of writing it into policy (particularly in the manner of your
> proposal which effectively renders the paragraph in question completely
> ineffective because the exception is so general, but even beyond that).
I would be happy to try to reword it. Again, suggestions appreciated.
> Is it really necessary to alienate lots of experienced users by
> insisting that GNOME and KDE are exceptions to all the rules whose
> consistent application has up until now made Debian a pleasure to use?
I consider myself an experienced user, and I would not feel alienated by
this change. To the contrary, I think it would be for the better.
> Remember in particular that not everyone uses them as a complete
> environment.
Sure. That will always be supported to some extent, but it not going to
be the ideal mode of operation.
> But you're insisting that nobody might ever use it in a way different
> from what its designers expected.
No, just that if you do, it will be less optimal.
> This is just not true in the real
> world: I've been known to fire up konqueror from a slightly GNOMEish
> environment, and it had better not try to spawn KDE's editor and KDE's
> pager for things. If I want it to do that, I'll unset $EDITOR and
> $PAGER.
Are you seriously suggesting that if I browse to a text file inside
Nautilus, because I have PAGER=less set, it should fire up an xterm or
something with less? No way! I have PAGER=less for all those old
terminal apps, and I don't want that to affect modern applications.
Likewise for EDITOR. If I wanted that to happen, I'd configure GNOME to
do so.
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