Re: vi vs. nvi

[Jim Wise <jwise%draga.com@localhost>]

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On Fri, 18 Jul 2008, David Young wrote:

># ls -l `which nvi`
>-r-xr-xr-x  3 root  wheel  466648 Jul 18 16:51 /usr/bin/nvi
># ls -l `which vi`
>-r-xr-xr-x  3 root  wheel  286516 Jul 18 16:52 /usr/bin/vi
>
>I am concerned that nvi is too big for embedded applications.

Forget for a second that vi needs a fair amount of shared library code 
and on-disk support files to be useful, so that space difference is, as 
a percentage, much smaller than it looks.

Most embedded applications don't need to include vi.  As for those which 
provide enough of a `unix-like' environment for vi to be relevant, I 
can't think of a current embedded platform for which 160K is a lot of 
space.

Let's _please_ not let this sort of hand-waving about alleged problems 
for embedded developers detract from NetBSD's usefulness as a server -- 
a problem space where a good basic editor capable of handling 
multinational character sets is something we currently lack as compared 
to our competition.

- -- 
                                Jim Wise
                                jwise%draga.com@localhost
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