On Fri, Oct 02, 2009 at 10:29:08AM +0100, Neil Bothwick wrote: > On Fri, 2 Oct 2009 03:52:24 -0500, forgottenwizard wrote: > > > > Nano is not non-existent by default. > > > It isn't always on the users sytem. Providing a non-existent default > > seems quite broken to me. > > That's true of every editor, so you have to choose the one that is most > likely to be there, the one that is installed for the stage tarballs and > is there unless the user has taken specific steps to remove it.
Or you could try to find a suitable default intelligently instead of blindly compiling in a default that may or may not exist. Worse still is blindly doing so without telling the user. > > > A more sensible approach would be for the ebuild to check which ebuild > > > satisfies the virtual/editor dependency and set that. If the OP really > > > cared about this "problem" he'd investigate providing such solutions > > > instead of ranting about how Gentoo does not use his editor of choice > > > by default. > > > The problem there would be if multiple editors provide virtual/editor > > (such as on my system, which has both vim and ed installed). The ebuild > > trying to automagically select what should be the default editor is a > > bad idea, if not just horrible. > > You can't have it both ways. You want the program to default to an editor > that is guaranteed to be there, at least at installation time, yet the > only one that satisfies that is virtual/editor. It's only a default, it > only has to be available the first time you run the program, whether > it's your favourite editor or not. If you only want to use default > configurations without making any changes to suit yourself, I suggest you > may be better served by a distro that is a little browner. And if you, say, have two editors installed that satisfy virtual/editor?
