On Thu, 1 Aug 1996, Guy Maor wrote: > > 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.
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