Paride Legovini <p...@ninthfloor.org> writes: > On Fri, 25 Aug 2017 10:09:34 +0200 Jeroen Dekkers <jer...@dekkers.ch> wrote:
>> Nano is priority important which means it will be installed by default >> and someone who explicitly uninstalls nano will probably also install >> another editor. I doubt a dependency on editor will make any difference >> in practice. > I agree, I see no advantage in adding a default-editor: if we have to > add complexity then it's better to just keep the virtual package. On the technical front, I think keeping the editor virtual package as it's currently (occasionally) used is not really viable, because it doesn't have well-defined behavior. Depending directly on a virtual package that provides as wildly varying functionality as editor does results in essentially random experience for users if the dependency is ever used. We had a long discussion about this over MTAs, and I think if we want to keep the editor virtual package structure, we would need to add default-editor just so that we can get reliable and predictable behavior, similar to what we did with default-mta. We could, of course, do that; the question is whether it's worth it. Of course, dropping the virtual package also gives us predictable behavior, just in a different way, and with a risk that editor won't exist on minimal installations that don't include important packages. (My patch assumes that we're okay with that risk, given how editors are normally used.) > I maintain 'vis', which Provides 'editor', and I prepared a new version > where this is not done anymore, but I still have to publish it. Is this > issue to be considered as settled? I see that 'nano' already dropped its > Provides line, so I guess it is. Ideally I'd like myon to feel comfortable with this proposed outcome, and the proposed wording hasn't gotten enough seconds yet. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
