Date: Mon, 12 Aug 2002 05:55:33 -0700 (PDT) From: Ross Lippert <ripper@eskimo.com> To: schweikh@FreeBSD.org Cc: schweikh@FreeBSD.org, freebsd-bugs@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: misc/40843: ee should be default editor of root Message-ID: <200208121255.FAA05787@eskimo.com> In-Reply-To: <200208121152.g7CBqP5g002607@freefall.freebsd.org> (message from Jens Schweikhardt on Mon, 12 Aug 2002 04:52:25 -0700 (PDT))
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Then what was the point of ee? When ee came out, I was very pleased that FreeBSD was moving in a direction in which I could teach someone how to use it without having to teach vi along with it. It looked to me like a good idea at the time to minimize the necessary overhead in getting to know the system for the first time, and I expected the change to propagate to all apps which invoked an editor, but it has been a long while and nothing has come of it. Can you tell me why my PR should not then be turned into "ee should be discarded since it is not the default". When doing a sysinstall, ee is used to edit config files like inetd.conf, and yet, once the install is done, if the user does vipw or send-pr, they get plunked into vi. This is horribly inconsistent. It is not that I want to start an editor war, but if an editor war will lead to consistency, then an editor war there must be. I think one or the other is just fine, with a slight pref for ee for the sake of newbies, but a mixed system is not. Either ee is sincerely adopted as THE default editor of FreeBSD, or we should stop kidding ourselves and tell any newbie that we consider vi to be an essential part of their BSD education (before ee existed, learning vi was part of my FreeBSD education). I do not consider either of these options unacceptable, but neither of them is being followed consistently. It is less burdensome to have EDITOR=ee and have the expert user switch it than demand that the newbie learn this. It places almost no burden on the expert, but an explanation of environment variables and their effects is a substantial burden on the newbie. >vi has been the default editor for so many programs and so many years >that it would be a POLA violation to change this for a BSD system that's >up and running. What is POLA? I do not recognize the acronym. The programs which require an editor, like vipw, and send-pr (which one might expect a newbie to fiddle with at some point, both respect the EDITOR variable. I do not see how changing the default .profile files on an install would really affect a BSD system that's up and running. Nor, do I see how this line of reasoning does not lead to the "abandon ee" conclusion mentioned before. -r To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-bugs" in the body of the message
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