On Wed, Jul 15, 2015 at 04:38:43PM +0200, Franco Lanza wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 15, 2015 at 09:35:03AM -0400, Rob Owens wrote:
> > Which is Devuan intended to be?
> >
> > 1) Debian without systemd
> > 2) A Debian-like distro
> >
>
> Nor 1 or 2.
> Devuan is intended to be a debian that respect:
> 1- freedom of choice
> 2- UNIX philosophy
> 3- KISS philosophy
>
> Of course first of all those 3 points make systemd unacceptable. But
> saying that devuan is just "debian withous systemd" is riductive.

The normal way of writing that first sentence would be
Of course, first of all, those 3 points...

> traditionally UNIX has vi, this is why i'm suggesting it. No packages
> needs to be changed at all for this eventual switch, and anyway,
> as devuan respect the users, this choice isn't an imposition from "the
> hight", but it's a question to the whole ml userbase to listen pro/cons.

For exactly the same reason I would conceptually like to have vi as the
default editor. (But then, I've added POSIXLY_CORRECT=1 to my .profile,
and removed bash from one of my Debian installs.)

But I hesitate to support your proposal for a few reasons:
* I don't think it's time to be changing Jessie in a way that has a big
impact on how it's used. Someone who is familiar with Debian Jessie
should not have any gotchas when installing Devuan Jessie.
(This is what I meant when I said it was a 'major' change.)
However, I think this *would* be a good time to decide if this
should go into Ascii.

* IMHO, Devuan cannot simply concede user-friendliness to other distros
at this point. All those 'other distros' are systemd-based, and we
would be essentially telling new users "You're better off using systemd'.
When someone has already started a blend/spin that is tuned towards
new users and it's going well, it might be good to revisit the issue.

* including both nano and vi would seem to be a better way to respect
freedom of choice. We're not talking about much disk space, but it's
acceptable to more users than any of the alternatives.

It's a nice thought, but I don't see it being a good idea at this time.

Thanks,
Isaac Dunham