Bug 6772 – Also include vi in install images, rather than cramming nano down our throats

• Product: Gentoo Release Media
• Status: RESOLVED FIXED

[Description David Ripton 2002-08-20 08:46:22 UTC]

Nano appears to be is a fine Pico clone, but that's no great thing since Pico is
a lousy editor, pretty much universally reviled by experienced Unix geeks.  It's
main feature is that it's newbie-friendly.  (Except for the downright evil
behavior of trashing your files with unwanted word-wraps by default, but that's
a separate bug report.)

I'm not asking that you remove nano, but please also include the smaller version
of vi (not vim, too big) in all new install images.  Gentoo is targeted at
experienced Linux/Unix users, most of whom already know vi.  There's no reason
to force an oddball, feature-poor, broken editor on them during the install
process.  It's not like Gentoo is a single-floppy distribution and every byte
counts.  This would make the initial install process less painful for a good
portion of your users, while having no effect at all on the rest, who could
continue to use nano.

[Comment 1 Bart Verwilst 2002-08-23 00:27:12 UTC]

The tarballs are already built, might be included in the next release though..  Since you only have to edit 4 files or so with nano, i'm not going to redo the  tarballs because of that.. If the users are so experienced as you say, i don't  think it's too advanced to use nano for the time being. as soon as you have  your base system, you can emerge any editor you want. I'll add nvi to the profile though 

[Comment 2 Chris Gianelloni (RETIRED) 2005-03-25 11:24:01 UTC]

Moving these so we can remove the "Install CD" component from "Gentoo Linux".

I apologize to everyone for this spam, but according to the bugzilla developers,
this is the only reasonable way to do this.