Re: [Sheflug] vi, emacs, sharp sticks

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <nospam [at] sk.tsukuba.ac.jp>]

>>>>> "Chris" == Chris J/#6 <sixie [at] nccnet.co.uk> writes:

    Chris> There was a thread on comp.unix.admin about vi vs. emacs
    Chris> and the role of a sysadmin. Large editors like emacs depend
    Chris> on lots of extra libs that may be mounted on a partition
    Chris> you can't get to if the system fails.

Not to worry.  On modern Linux systems, ld.so uses DLLs.  :-(

That is not true, of course, although one perverted friend of mine
(who happens to be named Chris :) did one drunken night figure out how
to export some of ld.so's code into a .so that could actually be
useful to other commands.  :-)

Howevva ... there are some essential proggies on Debian that are
statically linked, I guess on the theory that nobody could be so dumb
as to hose /lib/libc.  ldconfig, mount, init, ....

(oops, they seem to have recovered sanity---ldconfig _is_ static in the
current Debian.)

    Chris> vi apparently does benefit here with some systems having
    Chris> statically linked versions. Emacs is big as it stands. I'd
    Chris> rather not even think about statically linking that beast.

Oh, I do it, all the time.  A stripped full-featured temacs is not
much larger than some of the bulkier vi's that Debian distributes;
then it's a matter of being careful about what libraries you dump into
the emacs binary.  It's actually possible to fit a very functional
xemacs, including Gnus, EFS, dired, and the emerge suite into about
2MB on disk.  If you insist on having the docstring file that goes up
to 3.8MB ;-).  You have to give up a lot of the trimmings, like all
the X code, the PostgreSQL API, and the soundcard interface, and it
still uses memory like nobody's business once it starts running
(what's the difference between 32 and 36MB, right?)

    Chris> In the end, choose what you're happy with, and at least
    Chris> know the *basics* of vi if nothing else. One day, the
    Chris> health of your system may depend on it :)

Hear, hear.

None of what I said is intended to dissuade anybody from using vi; I
rather doubt that anybody will ever bother to make RPMs of an [X]Emacs
like that.  It's just a theoretical exercise.


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