ken wrote:
Things always get weird as one's installed distribution gets crusty.
My Fedora Core 27 installation recently started whining about conflicts
between nmh and vi. Surprised me.
Is this a "conflict" (as in, you can't have both of the packages
installed at the same time) or a "requirement" (you need to have vi
installed to use nmh)? You say "conflict", but later on you imply
it's a dependency issue.
FWIW, the spec file we use as a template in nmh only has a BuildRequires
of flex and ncurses-devel, and no requirements for vi. We don't
necessarily have control over the dependencies used by various
distributions in their nmh packages.
As for the the editor ... we had a discussion about that a while ago,
and the consensus was ${VISUAL} -> ${EDITOR} -> vi.
http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/nmh-workers/2013-01/msg00099.html
Does that mean that it should be a dependency of the packaging system?
I'm unclear on that. I'm not really interested in requiring people to
have EDITOR/VISUAL set, so we have to fall back to SOMETHING, and I think
vi is a reasonable default.
I remember that thread. I don't think anyone participating was
suggesting that there be a hard dependency on vi. As long as it's
clear from the docs (or the error message) that you can choose the
editor of your choice by setting an environment variable, then the
default of vi is just a nicety. So Jon's reported behavior should
be considered a bug in his distribution. (I think under
debian/ubuntu, the vi dependency would be a "suggested" installation,
not a requirement.)
paul
=----------------------
paul fox, pgf@foxharp.boston.ma.us (arlington, ma, where it's 42.6 degrees)
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