Bug#367991: please lower the alternative priority on 'view' (and 'editor')

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

Package: mc
Version: 1:4.6.1-2
Severity: normal

Hi, on my system I've three (set of) packages providing alternatives for
/usr/bin/view: nvi, vim(-*) and mcview-debian. These are their
priorities:

  zack at aquarium:~$ update-alternatives --display view| grep ^/
  /usr/bin/nview - priority 30
  /usr/bin/mcview-debian - priority 100
  /usr/bin/vim.basic - priority 30
  /usr/bin/vim.full - priority 60
  /usr/bin/vim.tiny - priority 10

[ I know from the nvi maintainer the nview will be lowered to 20 ]

I found annoying that mcview-debian has the higher priority, especially
because "view" was historically yet another way of running the 'vi'
editor.

Could you please lower the priority so that it is at least lesser than
that of vim.basic. A good solution IMO would be 25.

Wearing the hat of a vim maintainer: this will ensure that people
installing 'mc' on top of a base system will have mc per default (since
both nvi and vim-tiny are lower than it), but people installing 'vim'
will have that per default, winning over 'mc'.

If you prefer, being a discussion which require agreement on maintainers
of several packages we can move it to debian-devel. I honestly think
that the consensus will be the one outline above, but I maybe wrong.

Of course a similar argument exists for the alternatives of
/usr/bin/editor.

Many thanks for your attention,
Cheers.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Shell:  /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.15-1-686
Locale: LANG=it_IT.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=it_IT.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)

Versions of packages mc depends on:
ii  libc6                         2.3.6-7    GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libglib2.0-0                  2.10.2-2   The GLib library of C routines
ii  libgpmg1                      1.19.6-22  General Purpose Mouse - shared lib
ii  libslang2                     2.0.6-2    The S-Lang programming library - r

mc recommends no packages.

-- no debconf information