It's certainly an unfortunate default, and I had hoped it would be
brought up elsewhere, as, at least at one time, I seem to recall that
these sorts of issues weren't handled in bugs, especially for issues
involving confusing behaviour and vi.
One option would be to undo the changes made for the Debian bug, making
visudo use editor rather than vi once again, and then change the
documentation, which seems mainly to consist of the man page. For
consistency, however, it appears we would need to change vigr and vipw
as well.
Another would be to create a command edit_sudoers (and presumably
edit_passwd and edit_group as well), which would use editor/$EDITOR
instead (the latter is made more difficult, of course, by the env_reset
default of sudo); this would allow Ubuntu to have commands for editing
these files that would be usable by most cli users, while at the same
time not making the behaviour of the vi{sudo,pw,gr} commands unexpected
for those experienced with other systems.
I don't quite understand why visudo is so restrictive about the editor
anyway.
--
"visudo" is completely unusable (/etc/sudoers can only be editted with an
external text editor)
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/207369
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