Re: Bug#13287: less uses /usr/bin/editor without it necessarily being there.
On Tue, 7 Oct 1997, Christian Schwarz wrote:
> This issue was discussed on debian-devel (I think at that time,
> debian-policy did not exist yet). Ian J. posted an excellent solution to
> the editor/pager problem and noone objected so I went ahead and prepared
> the necessary policy changes. I think they were included in some of my
> "Policy Weekly" postings.
First of all, I'm not necessarily speaking in opposition to the current
policy here, but I am objecting to the way policy is being decided. An
"excelent solution" that "noone objected" to, should not constitute a
policy decission.
I pay close attention to traffic on the list. While this doesn't guarantee
that I will not miss things, I sure missed Ian's posting on this issue.
>
> Anyways, I'll send an announcement to debian-devel soon which explains the
> new policy so that the maintainers of all editors/pagers can update their
> packages.
>
I believe that this is backwards of the way things should work.
Announcement of proposed policy changes should preceed the decission
making. (I'm not sure if we should vote on each issue, but we need some
broader control than two people making the decission.
> > Can someone point me to the relevant chapters in the policy
> > manual?
>
> Policy Manual 2.3.0.0, Section 4.3 Editors and pagers
>
The policy manual doesn't make it very clear as to why the "editor" has
the responsibility, rather than the package that wishes to use it.
For instance, Pine can be configured to use an editor other than the the
built-in Pico editor. This configuration is established by the user within
his own account. While it seems pretty clear that these "individual user
controls" are addressed by the EDITOR and PAGER variables (and this seems
much cleaner than the update-alternatives approach) these variables are
not guaranteed to be set.
Rather than requiring every editor to "update-alternatives" I would
suggest that the base system come with a /etc/profile that sets these
variables to the "default" programs provided in base. This gives the
system administrator a place to change these for the system, and still
gives the individual user the option of changing the personal default.
None of this flexibility is provided by update-alternatives. Worse than
that, using this method adds another question to the installation process
of an editor (Do you want "this editor" to be the system default?)
Waiting is,
Dwarf
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