On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 06:13:49AM -0700, b. f. wrote: > > On Tuesday 23 June 2009 15:41:48 Manish Jain wrote: > > >That's the whole problem of /rescue/vi. When you suddenly find yourself > >in single-user mode, the last thing you want to do is realise that > >tweaking is needed for something which should work normally just when > >you need it, and quickly too. > > Yes. But there have been some recent changes: > > http://svn.freebsd.org/changeset/base/194628 > > that suggest that this problem is being addressed.
That's definitely good news. There isn't much point in putting something in /rescue that won't work when other filesystems won't mount. > > >But why are we talking about a few hundred > >kilos for such a basic utility as vi in times when everyone has hundreds > >of GB's on the disk, and the / partition itself is 512 MB by default. > >The BSD concept of having vi under /usr originated when resources were > >less by a factor of thousands (<= (100 MB disks), <= (8 MB physical RAM) > >and so on). When we are well past those kind of constraints, the concept > >needs an rethink. > > No, we're not. A lot of people are still using old hardware, or > embedded hardware, where efficiency in space and computational effort > are still important, and will remain so for a while. Please don't > encourage bloat. I sympathize with the desire to keep "bloat" down for the minimal default case. Embedded systems were the first examples that came to mind for cases where having vi in /bin might not be ideal. On the other hand, I don't see any reason to refuse to offer an optional install of /bin/vi for those who prefer it and don't want to have to brute-force "install" it by manually copying it, thus eliminating relatively simple and easy upgrades when security concerns demand it. -- Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Jon Postel, RFC 761: "[B]e conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others."
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