Re: Adding a simple editor to the base system

[Thor Lancelot Simon <tls%rek.tjls.com@localhost>]

On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 08:42:33PM +0000, David Brownlee wrote:
>       This was originally brought up on netbsd-desktop, now
>       redirected here as a more relevant forum.
>
>       I'd like to propose we add a simple text editor to the base
>       system. The obvious candidate is 'ee' from FreeBSD (who
>       have been including it since 1995).

We include this in our NetBSD-based firmware for some of our devices,
mostly because we migrated from FreeBSD and users expect it.

I have stripped it down to work with the NetBSD curses instead of
ncurses and to turn off some annoying chrome -- it's smaller than
the 56k you mention for the pkgsrc version.

That said, if we didn't have existing user demand for this editor in
particular, there is no way I would bloat up my firmware with it; but
as it stands, it's the only thing some of my customers are trained to
use for certain kinds of operations we must occasionally ask them to
perform when they call for support; so I have to.

I am opposed to spending 50K on this in 'base' for NetBSD.  The
"desktop NetBSD" I have seen proposed would include many add-on
packages in addition to the NetBSD base system, so it seems more
appropriate to offer it in that form.

I also think that the kind of Unix-savvy users who constitute most
of NetBSD's _current_ market share are likely to have little demand
for another editor in the base system -- we already ship three -- and
not like the example of feeping creaturism.  This doesn't add any
new functionality to base NetBSD; it just duplicates existing
functionality (a curses text editor) with a different user interface.

Those are the reasons why I would not add it.  However, should 'core'
decide that it should go in, certainly I can check in the version
I'm already shipping.

The one thing I stripped out that _does_ add a lot of space is
localization.  In FreeBSD base, ee is localized and that uses a lot
more space than 50K.  I'm unclear on whether we'd actually want that.

Thor