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

[forgottenwizard]

On Fri, Oct 02, 2009 at 10:29:08AM +0100, Neil Bothwick wrote:
> On Fri, 2 Oct 2009 03:52:24 -0500, forgottenwizard wrote:
>
> > > Nano is not non-existent by default.
>
> > It isn't always on the users sytem. Providing a non-existent default
> > seems quite broken to me.
>
> That's true of every editor, so you have to choose the one that is most
> likely to be there, the one that is installed for the stage tarballs and
> is there unless the user has taken specific steps to remove it.

Or you could try to find a suitable default intelligently instead of
blindly compiling in a default that may or may not exist. Worse still is
blindly doing so without telling the user.

> > > A more sensible approach would be for the ebuild to check which ebuild
> > > satisfies the virtual/editor dependency and set that. If the OP really
> > > cared about this "problem" he'd investigate providing such solutions
> > > instead of ranting about how Gentoo does not use his editor of choice
> > > by default.
>
> > The problem there would be if multiple editors provide virtual/editor
> > (such as on my system, which has both vim and ed installed). The ebuild
> > trying to automagically select what should be the default editor is a
> > bad idea, if not just horrible.
>
> You can't have it both ways. You want the program to default to an editor
> that is guaranteed to be there, at least at installation time, yet the
> only one that satisfies that is virtual/editor. It's only a default, it
> only has to be available the first time you run the program, whether
> it's your favourite editor or not. If you only want to use default
> configurations without making any changes to suit yourself, I suggest you
> may be better served by a distro that is a little browner.

And if you, say, have two editors installed that satisfy virtual/editor?