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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
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.
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.
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.