[OT] Debian mailinglists [was: RE: Debian or Ubuntu?]

[Les Mikesell]

Florian Diesch wrote:
>
>> Nobody, at any point in this thread, has argued against "text file based
>> configs".  I've argued against editing them with a text editor 
> 
> So it's fine to edit them as long as I don't use an editor?
> 
> 
>> - and you don't get _any_ of those benefits using vi.
> 
> The nice thing about text files is that there are so many tools to
> work with them. Shouldn't be much of a problem to integrate them in a
> modern vi clone like vim.

Text editors like vi that know how to pipe and filter actually include 
the functionality of any other program you can run that works with 
stdin/stdout.  For example, if you happen to be editing a config file 
that is really a snippet of perl in vi and you'd like to know if it is 
syntactically correct, you always have a perl syntax-checker at your 
disposal.  Just ":w !perl -c". And no extra bloat in the editor to 
support that.  Of course, checking functional correctness of perl code 
takes a little more work.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com