From bug-request at octave dot org Tue Jan 18 21:17:22 2005
Subject: Re: Bug#290470: octave2.1: Octave's bug_report needs emacs or $EDITOR
From: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
To: Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian dot org>
Cc: Rafael Laboissiere <rafael at debian dot org>, bug@octave.org,         Thomas Weber <weber@num.uni-sb.de>, 290470@bugs.debian.org
Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2005 22:20:13 -0500

On 18-Jan-2005, Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian dot org> wrote:

| I don't really know either, or I would have suggested it. We, as you know,
| try to get by without environment variables. A Debian-only fix therefore
| would be to talk to /usr/bin/sensible-editor, which is guaranteed to be
| present. But that doesn't help in the general case for Octave.
| 
| It may not be worth going overboard here. You could do some autoconf magic
| to check for emacs, xemacs, vi and remember the choice.  Or do that with
| shell when the above is executed.

That would be better, since the binary may be running on a system
different from the one where configure was run.

| In either event, I think it would be fair
| to abort with a message "no editor found, tempfile in /tmp/$foo left for
| manual continuation" or some such.

I think we already do something like this:

  devzero:260> EDITOR=foobar octave-bug
  /usr/bin/octave-bug: line 226: foobar: command not found
  problems with edit -- no bug report submitted
  saving message in /home/jwe/dead-octave-bug-1

OK, I just checked the bashbug script (which I used as the starting
point for octave-bug way back when) and it now uses

  if [ -z "$DEFEDITOR" ] && [ -z "$EDITOR" ]; then
	  if [ -x /usr/bin/editor ]; then
		  DEFEDITOR=editor
	  elif [ -x /usr/local/bin/ce ]; then
		  DEFEDITOR=ce
	  elif [ -x /usr/local/bin/emacs ]; then
		  DEFEDITOR=emacs
	  elif [ -x /usr/contrib/bin/emacs ]; then
		  DEFEDITOR=emacs
	  elif [ -x /usr/bin/emacs ]; then
		  DEFEDITOR=emacs
	  elif [ -x /usr/bin/xemacs ]; then
		  DEFEDITOR=xemacs
	  elif [ -x /usr/contrib/bin/jove ]; then
		  DEFEDITOR=jove
	  elif [ -x /usr/local/bin/jove ]; then
		  DEFEDITOR=jove
	  elif [ -x /usr/bin/vi ]; then
		  DEFEDITOR=vi
	  else
		  echo "$0: No default editor found: attempting to use vi" >&2
		  DEFEDITOR=vi
	  fi
  fi

  : ${EDITOR=$DEFEDITOR}

so I'll copy this method.

jwe



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