Re: Bug#13287: less uses /usr/bin/editor without it necessarily being there.
On Tue, 7 Oct 1997, Dale Scheetz wrote:
> On Tue, 7 Oct 1997, Christian Schwarz wrote:
> > 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?)
As I understand it, the editor and pager alternatives are meant to provide
a "sane default" in the absence of user action. If the administrator of
individual user wants to set the PAGER or EDITOR variables, programs
should respect that (by checking the appropriate environment variable).
If those variables aren't set, they should use 'pager' or 'editor' which
should be sane defaults (avoids defaulting to more and vi/ae
unconditionally). So far, less has a higher priority than more (i don't
know if most follows this policy yet), so less is prefered over more in
the update-alternatives. I wasn't aware that update-alternatives was
capable of asking a question though (update-mime or whatever is), I
thought it assumed that the first installed of equal priorities won.
I'd assume we'd orginize the priorities for editors as "ae, vi,
joe/jed/etc, emacs [due to bloat]".
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