Ken Hornstein writes:
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.
--Ken
Below is a recent update attempt. It seems that part of the issue is requiring
a particular version of vi which doesn't seem necessary.
And I'm not disagreeing with the need to fall back to SOMETHING, I just think
that it makes more sense to have an error if that SOMETHING can't be found than
to have it be dependency. After all, that SOMETHING could go away after nmh
was installed, so it would seem like that case would need to be handled anyway.
sudo dnf -y update
[sudo] password for jon:
Last metadata expiration check: 0:59:34 ago on Fri 09 Mar 2018 07:00:04 AM PST.
Dependencies resolved.
Problem: package nmh-1.6-14.fc27.x86_64 requires /bin/vi, but none of the
providers can be installed
- cannot install both vim-minimal-2:8.0.1553-1.fc27.x86_64 and
vim-minimal-2:8.0.1527-1.fc27.x86_64
- cannot install both vim-minimal-2:8.0.1176-1.fc27.x86_64 and
vim-minimal-2:8.0.1553-1.fc27.x86_64
- cannot install the best update candidate for package
vim-minimal-2:8.0.1527-1.fc27.x86_64
- cannot install the best update candidate for package nmh-1.6-14.fc27.x86_64
====================================================================================================================================
Package Arch Version
Repository Size
====================================================================================================================================
Skipping packages with conflicts:
(add '--best --allowerasing' to command line to force their upgrade):
vim-minimal x86_64 2:8.0.1176-1.fc27
fedora 532 k
vim-minimal x86_64 2:8.0.1553-1.fc27
updates 540 k
Transaction Summary
====================================================================================================================================
Skip 2 Packages
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