Re: [gentoo-dev] Resolve build time default editor dependency. (was: How get ebuild provider virtual/category.)

[Tavis Ormandy]

On Sun, Nov 12, 2006 at 04:21:21PM +0300, Peter Volkov (pva) wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-11-12 at 12:15 +0000, Tavis Ormandy wrote:
> > The only `hardcoded` editor is the fallback editor for
> > visudo
>
> And this is the problem I'm talking about. I do not see any reasons to
> keep this not working fallback. There are parts of code that just do not
> work in Gentoo.
>

Talking specifically about sudo, I think you're making a big deal out of
a very minor thing, primarily because I cannot think of a sane example
of when $EDITOR and $VISUAL are not set and visudo (which requires an
interactive editor) would be invoked. 

If you can give some examples, maybe I would understand.

> > which can be set with the editor default in sudoers.
>
> That's good. But some packages (I'm talking about practically *all*
> crontab, vipw, vigr and may be other applications) do not have such
> configuration file to configure that default editor.

I dont have much of an opinion on these things, although I think
expecting /bin/vi to be an screen oriented interactive editor (not
nescessarily vi) should be a sane assumption, and if it isnt, that is
the real bug.

> And IMO configuration file should change *sane* defaults but I do not
> think nano is sane default ;)

I really hate nano and pico, I cannot understand how people use them, it
isnt the default because I'm a closet pico fan, I can assure you :)

sudo's default fallback is /bin/vi, but I received some bugs about this
several years ago, and after some discussion on -dev, we decided that
nano should take this place. Things have changed since then, nano used
to be `special` in that we could make assumptions about it, maybe i'll
change it back to /bin/vi, but I dont think it matters much.

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