Subject: Re: Bug#3795: ae should not be essential

From: Guy Maor <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 1 Aug 1996 12:51:33 -0500 (CDT)

> Christian Hudon writes ("Re: Bug#3795: ae should not be essential"):
> > Isn't it that some of the packages that look at EDITOR fall back to ae if
> > there are problems with EDITOR?

vipw and vigr do this.  They're in passwd which is essential, but won't
be as soon as I upload a new version.

Guy

---

From: Craig Sanders <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 4 Aug 1996 11:15:37 +1000 (EST)

On Thu, 1 Aug 1996, Guy Maor wrote:

> > > Isn't it that some of the packages that look at EDITOR fall back
> > > to ae if there are problems with EDITOR?
>

Actually, they default to ae unless you override it with "export
EDITOR=/usr/bin/vi". I wouldn't mind so much if they just had a fallback
to ae if vi wasn't available but running ae by default from a command
named after vi just doesn't make any sense.

it's really disconcerting when you type 'vipw' or 'vigr' on a freshly
installed system (where you've spent 20 mins in dselect selecting
packages, including unselecting nvi & elvis and selecting vim), start
typing vi commands into the type-ahead buffer before it's finished
loading, and then find that the first line of /etc/passwd or /etc/group
is mangled with jjjjwwww or whatever.

I know this has been discussed before, but vipw does NOT mean ae.

maybe the best solution would be to have aepw & aegr as symlinks to vipw
& vigr. When, for example, vipw is executed, it checks for existence of
/usr/bin/vi. if vi doesn't exist, it either prints a message saying "vi
is not installed. try aepw" or just uses ae, or prints a warning message
before running ae.

Craig