Re: Russ Allbery 2017-08-24 <87efs1lyc7....@hope.eyrie.org> > Oh, thank you! For some reason, apt-cache rdepends didn't show any of > those packages. All of them except dnsvi are Suggests, which basically > doesn't accomplish anything. > > Copying myon on this message as maintainer of dnsvi, which has a > dependency on "vim | editor". Christoph, we're proposing finally removing > the editor virtual package completely, with the patch included here:
Thanks for the notice. I'm quite surprised that my dnsvi seems to be the only package in Debian that requires a text editor. Given that our base doesn't really include one, and getting dependencies Just Right is among the things that Debian is really good at, dropping the existing "editor" virtual package seems Just Wrong to me. Even if "editor" was de-officialized in 1996, it is very much used today. Bill's original list from 2015 was incomplete (it is much longer now, but given that even emacs was missing, I'd think the grep command used back then was wrong): $ grep-dctrl -F Provides editor -nsPackage /var/lib/apt/lists/deb_debian_dists_sid_main_binary-amd64_Packages | xargs deutex edbrowse emacs25 emacs25-lucid emacs25-nox fte-console fte-terminal fte-xwindow jed xjed jove jupp le ledit levee lpe mg xul-ext-password-editor nano nano-tiny ne pluma rlfe rlwrap scite vigor vile xvile vim vim-athena vim-gtk vim-gtk3 vim-nox vim-tiny vis xul-ext-exteditor Wouldn't it much better (cleaner, more correct, more userfriendly) to promote "editor" to official status instead? Christoph
