Bug#880992: debian-policy should not recommend running editor using absolute path

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Hi,

Sean Whitton wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 06 2017, Jonathan Nieder wrote:

>> 	Thus, every program that launches an editor or pager must use
>> 	the EDITOR or PAGER environment variable to determine the editor
>> 	or pager the user wishes to use. If these variables are not set,
>> 	the programs /usr/bin/editor and /usr/bin/pager should be used,
>> 	respectively.
>>
>> If read strictly, this says that I must use "/usr/bin/editor" instead
>> of invoking "editor" from the $PATH.  (I'm not sure I agree with that
>> interpretation, but it came up in https://bugs.debian.org/682347.)
>> Running "editor" from the $PATH instead of using that full path should
>> be perfectly acceptable and IMHO is a better behavior, since it allows
>> the user to put a custom editor in /usr/local/bin or $HOME/bin.
>
> ISTM that the intention is for the user to set EDITOR and PAGER to
> select an editor or pager, rather than putting things called 'editor'
> and 'pager' into PATH.

I understand and agree, but that doesn't mean that packages should
invoke editor using an absolute path.

Policy describes package behavior, not user behavior.

Further, a sysadmin on a shared machine doesn't have a way to set
EDITOR for all users, but they can install an editor command to
/usr/local/bin/.  I've seen sysadmins at a university do something
similar for e.g. a custom build of gcc.  It would be more robust for
the sysadmin to use alternatives instead, but I'm just saying it's
more polite for a package to respect what the user was trying to do.

>                        This seems sensible because 'editor' and 'pager'
> are fairly generic terms and a user might have things in ~/bin/editor or
> ~/bin/pager that don't edit or page, respectively.

Really?  That would be a reason for the 'editor' and 'pager' commands
to be named something else.  But on the contrary, I find 'editor' and
'pager' to be pretty clear names for what they do.

Is there additional information or context I can provide to change
your mind?  Note that the change I am proposing is to allow packages
to invoke 'editor' from $PATH, not to require them to do so.  There
are existing packages (e.g., Git) that already do this.  This is
similar to upstream packages invoking "less" or "more" from the $PATH
instead of relying on it to be at a particular path.

Jonathan