Editors in the default install (Re: Slimming down default install?)

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Sat, Dec 04, 2004 at 07:55:04PM +0000, Martin Alderson wrote:

> I notice that emacs, vim and pico/nano are installed by default.
> Surely the point of Ubuntu is to offer a flexible, feature complete
> 'base' and work on top of it. I highly commend you for having only one
> web browser, one office suite, one video player, one audio player -
> not the 4 of each that most other distros ship with.
> 
> I would suggest keeping pico (because it's the smallest) and get rid
> of emacs and vim. Those two take up around 20MB in my estimation,
> which is a lot of space that could be used for something else.

In this instance, they are there for different use cases:

- nano is present to provide a basic text editing facility for recovery and
  diagnostic use, which anyone can easily learn and use

- vim is there for traditional UNIX reasons, to provide vi

- emacs is a programmer's editor

I think a case could be made for removing emacs from the default desktop
install, but not the other two (which are part of base).

-- 
 - mdz