[openbeos] Re: patch for vim on haiku

On 2005-03-26 at 20:05:11 [-0500], Ingo Weinhold wrote:
> 
> On 2005-03-25 at 17:47:52 [+0100], Michael Phipps wrote:
> > My personal take is that neither Vim nor any other cli editor should be 
> > included into a downloadable Haiku base. Downloading software with Haiku is 
> > pretty easy. I think that we need to make the minimal download as small as 
> > possible while providing what most people need.
> 
> With this argument you could strip the base off virtually everything save 
> Tracker + Deskbar, Firefox (or Mozilla), BeMail (or some other mail client), 
> and a media player. Why a text editor? What most people want would be a word 
> processor, but that is probably not part of a base distro.

For a ***DOWNLOAD*** base, I think that the fewer applications, the better. For 
something on CD, I think that we should install the same as the downloaded 
base. I would challenge people - count the number of apps from a base install 
of R5, Max, Zeta, etc). Then count how many you use regularly. Then count how 
many apps you downloaded and use regularly. 

There is always a balancing act between wanting the system to be hugely usable 
on install and wanting the download to be small and bandwidth saving. 
Personally, I think that the most minimal download possible is the "right 
thing". 
 
> > StyledEdit is an incredible
> > piece of work and I think that is it more than adequite for what most 
> > people will want/need and should be showcased since it is a Haiku native 
> > app. :-D
> 
> I don't want to belittle the work of the StyledEdit creators, but honestly, 
> who does use it and for what purpose? (I believe, the only thing I've ever 
> used it for was to write ReadMe files included with software, since one could 
> basically do plain text but nevertheless beautify it by adding some text 
> attributes like font size and color -- and I'm not even doing that anymore, 
> since using Pe.) To write a letter? Heck, I use a word processor. For editing 
> config files? That's certainly nothing an average used does or should do. For 
> personal notes? I want an organizer kind of app. Editing of structured text 
> (HTML, source code)? I prefer an editor that does at least syntax 
> highlighting.

I use SE all the time. VIM is wonderful for a lot of things, but since we don't 
have a GUI for it, any time I want to edit text with a GUI, I use SE.
 
> I seriously don't think, StyledEdit is really adequate for any kind of job. 
> Save for writing ReadMe files that look a bit better than plain text (and 
> make less work than HTML) maybe. It's just that an OS is expected to include 
> at least a simple editor app. As it is expected to include a CLI and an 
> editor for it (all the OSs I have in mind, do that anyway). We can certainly 
> go a different way, but than we can as well cut more radically (Terminal, 
> StyledEdit, DiskProbe, telnetd,...).

PERSONALLY, I would cut telnetd and DiskProbe. Both are dangerous in the hands 
of the newbie and/or the clueless and are pretty rarely used by most anyone. 
Other than hard core devs, who uses DiskProbe? And telnetd, as an unsecure 
protocol, should go away, as should ftpd. 
 
> Personally I find BeOS mostly a quite well balanced basic distro, though. I 
> would probably remove a few things and add some others instead, but basically 
> that's what I'd have in mind.

Honestly, I do, too, remembering that it was designed to be distributed on CD 
where bandwidth is not an issue. Personally, I would love to see R1 as a 60meg 
zip file for d/l. I don't think that is an unreachable goal (not even having 
looked at where we are now). I believe that we should treat the users' machine 
and resources sort of like the fridge at a friend's house - we should take what 
we need, but nothing more.

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