Bug#682347: mark 'editor' virtual package name as obsolete
Christoph Berg <myon@debian.org> writes:
> Thanks for the notice. I'm quite surprised that my dnsvi seems to be the
> only package in Debian that requires a text editor. Given that our base
> doesn't really include one, and getting dependencies Just Right is among
> the things that Debian is really good at, dropping the existing "editor"
> virtual package seems Just Wrong to me.
Yeah, that gut instinct resonates with me too. But... we've not done this
since 1996, so is it worth the effort to try to get everyone to change? I
feel like going the other route would be some amount of work for a bunch
of packages with no perceivable benefit in Debian.
I can write language for that instead, but I know way, way more packages
assume that editor is available than currently depend on it, and I'm
reluctant to declare them to be buggy. You seem to be the only package
maintainer who was using this "correctly."
Note that if we do go down the path of making it official, we'd probably
need to introduce something like default-editor and standardize a
dependency of default-editor | editor, so this is a non-trivial amount of
work. (You don't want a package to depend on editor and pull emacs25 into
a minimal chroot because that happened to be the first package providing
editor that apt saw.) For instance, you depend on vim | editor right now,
but vim is quite heavy-weight, and our default editor is nano.
> Even if "editor" was de-officialized in 1996, it is very much used
> today. Bill's original list from 2015 was incomplete (it is much longer
> now, but given that even emacs was missing, I'd think the grep command
> used back then was wrong):
I re-ran this check with my original message and Bcc'd everyone who came
up as providing editor (using grep-aptavail). I didn't include the list
in one of the bug messages but probably should have.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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