Re: Adding a simple editor to the base system

[David Brownlee <abs%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

        [comments regarding the definition of 'simple editor']

        Yes, it was semantic lazyness. It would have been better has
        I written "simple and intuitive" when describing ee.

        I think the main argument against ee is a philosophical
        one:  It invites the "wrong type of people" into the NetBSD
        club.  My problem with that is... it also invites a lot
        of the right type of people as well, people who are
        intelligent, technical, but just not interested in a rite
        of passage involving mastering a text editor written over
        30 years ago and designed for the LSI ADM3A terminal.


        If we are *actually* serious about restricting NetBSD to
        those who really understand what they are doing on a unix
        system then we should also be ripping out sysinst and go
        back to the previous install system with its "you will need
        a calculator a pencil and some paper".

        Actually, better still, the install disk should drop to a
        shell prompt and just include the required commands to
        partition, newfs, mount, download and install a system,
        plus of course the man pages so a user can determine
        how to use the individual commands.

        Any user who then installs the system then should have a
        good understanding of how unix disklabels, partitions, makes
        file systems, extracts files from tar and everything else.

        Maybe we should leave the manpages in the tarfiles and they
        have to extract them first before they can read them.

        Actually, we can probably drop 'ls' from the list of commands,
        after all, if we're happy to drop people into vi without any
        information on how to use it, working out what commands are
        available from a unix shell should be trivial in comparison.

        Enough with the hairshirts. They itch.

--
                David/absolute       -- www.NetBSD.org: No hype required --