Bug 742225

Summary:	missing dependency to vi
Product:	[Fedora] Fedora	Reporter:	Mads Kiilerich <mads>
Component:	shadow-utils	Assignee:	Peter Vrabec <pvrabec>
Status:	CLOSED NOTABUG	QA Contact:	Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity:	unspecified	Docs Contact:
Priority:	unspecified
Version:	16	CC:	pvrabec, tmraz
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Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
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Last Closed:	2011-11-10 16:10:50 UTC	Type:	---
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oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Embargoed:

Description Mads Kiilerich 2011-09-29 12:47:16 UTC

vipw will by default use vi, but there is no dependency to vi. It is thus possible to end up with a non-working vipw.

I would expect a dependency to /bin/vi or vim-minimal ... or something that sets a global EDITOR in some kind of alternatives system.

I am however also aware that shadow-utils is a very fundamental package and that a dependency to vim could be considered a regression.

shadow-utils-4.1.4.3-7.fc16.x86_64

Comment 1 Tomas Mraz 2011-09-29 13:45:44 UTC

Surely, I do not think that adding dependency to vi is desirable on shadow-utils. And adding a special subpackage for vipw seems to me like an overkill as well.
However vipw should fail gracefully with a proper error message suggesting to install the vi.

Comment 2 Peter Vrabec 2011-11-10 16:10:50 UTC

sh: vi: command not found
vipw: vi: No such file or directory
vipw: vi: No such file or directory
vipw: /etc/passwd is unchanged

I hope these messages are OK.

Comment 3 Mads Kiilerich 2011-11-10 16:35:02 UTC

Well ... yes ... the messages are Ok. They show that the package is missing a requirement ;-)

IIRC debian patches _every_ application with their own editor scheme. I don't like their way of doing it, but I think Fedora should have some kind of solution to the problem.

Wouldn't a simple but working scheme be to let all editors drop a (prioritized) snippet in /etc/profile.d setting EDITOR and/or VISUAL and provide "editor". That would allow shadow-utils (and sudo and crontab and...) to grow a dependency to "editor" without forcing users to install a particular editor.