Re: [gentoo-user] Am I wrong?..

[Joshua Murphy]

2009/10/2 Arthur D. <spinal.by@××××.ru>:
>>> You appear to be demonstrating that you don't fully understand the
>>> problem:
>>>
>>> 828 ~ $ grep nano /usr/portage/app-admin/sudo/sudo-1.7.2_p1.ebuild
>>>        # XXX: /bin/vi may not be available, make nano visudo's default.
>>>                --with-editor=/bin/nano \
>>
>> How so? That config option for sudo sets the DEFAULT editor, what to use
>> if nothing is defined in the config file or environment variable. That's
>> what both my text and the portion of the ebuild that you have quoted
>> state. It in no way forces the use of nano in order to use visudo. If
>> that were the case, DEPENDS would specify nano instead of accepting
>> virtual/editor.
>
> Agree. There's no need in making vim as depends. But in other hand in
> vanilla sudo
> package there's VI hardcoded by default. And MOST if not ALL users who have
> VIM
> installed on their shiny Gentoo systems expect that VIsudo will behave as it
> did
> for long tim ago. There are historical (or some other) reasons for making VI
> default
> editor for this utility. It's like they don't respect not only endusers
> favours but
> the developers' too, no?
>
> WHY NOT CHECK if vim binary is in place and ONLY THEN (when it's obviously
> absent)
> hardcode the Gentoo Best Award of Choice Editor?
>
> I repeat once more.
> Every user who has VIM installed on theirs systems is forced to do extra
> configuration, to make sudo work as expected, just because someone prefer
> other editor and thinks that vanilla choice is bad. Isn't that just stupid?
>
> --
> Best regards, Spinal

And everyone who has emacs has to do extra work too, in order to get
sudo to respect their chosen editor. Changing the default fallback for
visudo when the environment variable isn't defined will add in further
dependencies and/or put a dependency on a package that can't be
reasonably assumed to be on the system in the near future. You're not
being forced to do more work because you use vim, you're doing more
work because you remove the sane default editor from the system. As
does everyone removing nano and using pico.... and... how many others?
Go to LFS, build it all, build emacs, set EDITOR to emacs, and run
sudo visudo. Please. I have a rather good guess that you'll be,
amazingly, using the default that was set at build time for the sane
default editor, in LFS's case vim (whether called by that or the vi
symlink to it), that the distro creators chose. Or if you vary from
the instructions, choosing some other editor at sudo's build time,
you'll be running that. The ebuild does the logical thing in choosing
an editor that a) is in place by default and b) is less likely to be
on the system or off the system by the admin's whim. Most leave the
default in place. I suppose, really, the only more guaranteed editor
would be "busybox vi" ... because VERY few go about breaking the
default tools built into busybox... but what would that leave the many
who use nano by default, as... it IS the distro default, to do?
Compared to nano, vi (let alone a bare minimal vi like is in busybox)
is a pain to use for a person who's never seen it before.

Also, randomly, I could be wrong here, not being a sudo user myself
outside of my ubuntu laptop... but if you look into sudo ... it drops
the environment, aside from those chosen specifically to be preserved
by root, through its configuration, as a security measure. It's not an
ebuild problem, it's not a 'defaults' problem. From what you seem to
see as 'proper' behavior for sudo, it's an upstream security decision
problem.

-- 
Poison [BLX]
Joshua M. Murphy
Yet another vim user.