I have often thought about what a minimal Haiku install should look like. There
are a lot of shell commands that are uncommonly used that Be included (flex and
bison, for example). Should we be strictly bound by what Be did?
Vim is a perfect example. Developers will use it (except Francois the Wicked
Emacs User :-) ), but most AVERAGE users will not. How much difference would it
make in download time to have *only* the most used shell commands as part of
the default package, then an add on install that has all of the UNIX goodness
that devs want. Something to think about as release time gets closer.
----- Original Message -----
From: Axel Dörfler <axeld@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thursday, March 24, 2005 8:00 am
Subject: [openbeos] Re: patch for vim on haiku
> Niels Reedijk <niels.reedijk@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > Anyone care to look into our vim issues?
> > May I propose to drop vim altogether? Don't get me wrong, I love vim
> > as an editor and I use it almost daily, however, it's a rather bulky
> > application for normal users. People that really want to use vim (=
> > powerusers) will know where to find it. Furthermore, it creates sort
> > of a mess in the /etc dir (which, I think, still is a very bad
> idea
> > in
> > BeOSland).
>
> AFAICT it only has a /etc/vim directory there, nothing more (well
> anything is inside that directory, so I wouldn't call it a mess).
>
> > There are probably a whole slew of lighter vi-compatible
> > implementations.
>
> I disagree here. Of course, we could simply drop all the files in
> /etc/vim from the standard distribution, that makes vim still a
> usable
> editor.
> But I don't really see the point in having it cut down that way;
> you
> save about 700kB. With the explanation above, you could also
> remove
> most other shell commands; I don't think that's a good idea at all.
> Also, I think that former Linux/BSD/Unix users should feel a bit
> at
> home in BeOS as well. Currently they do with the selection of GNU
> commands that comes with BeOS, and vim is definitely a part of it.
>
> Bye,
> Axel.
>
>
>
