[POLL] Do you want nano added to unRAID?

[nicinabox]

I'm confused as to why "as a plugin" is an option? Nano a native package. Anyone can install it and place it in /boot/extra.

 

I agree.

 

Nano as a plugin is crazy considering the size of it, what it is and pretty much any documentation / blogs / guides a Linux noob will see on the Web will use nano over VIM.

 

Personally... I am not writing a guide or posting a VM Appliance until the next beta (which will have nano in it). Like it or not, for users to do a lot of the Xen / VM Appliance stuff it requires editing some cfg files.

 

If that isn't isn't hard enough... Imagine writing a guide and having to explain to a novice how to use VIM on top of that...

 

Hit "a", then add what you want, hit "esc" and move there to delete, hit "d", then "del" until it's gone, then hit "esc", then ":", then "w" and then "q", etc.

 

Screw that noise!

 

The dorks that get off on VIM can continue to use it and impress their dork friends on how "cool" they are. The rest of us will use nano.

 

I'm certainly for having nano out of the box.

 

I use vim and nano professionally. The learning curve for nano is definitely a lot lower, and it would be really easy to go off the nano vs vim vs emacs deep end, but that's not what this is (or should be) about. It's about people being able to administrate their machines.

 

It still boggles my mind how someone could be using unraid/slackware and not take 15 minutes to learn some terminal/editing basics, but that's another discussion.

 

Bigger picture: I'd much rather see a progression towards modularity than an appeal to have packages added to the core.

 

What were you thinking? Any ideas / suggestions on how to do this?

 

This is probably best split into another topic but briefly:

 

Based on my experience building boiler and trolley, this is not a trivial task. It really needs some leaders showing real solutions, layout out standards, and getting some acceptance between developers (that's mostly plugin authors probably). General users' opinions are nice, but they're often under- or misinformed and add lots of noise without actually solving real problems.

 

There's no way Limetech can cover all the bases, nor should they be responsible to do so. Modularity is important in any system (be it roof racks or operating systems), and having the right tools can go a long way in helping everyone get what they want.

 

Unraid gives some unique challenges in addition to the normal slackware linux challenges. I don't claim to have all the answers, but I have put a lot of thought into how it could be better overall, and I have working code, APIs, and infrastructure to back it up (and there's a lot more of that). I'm happy to discuss these details further and to help work towards a solution to this problem.

 

Opinionated rambling follows:

 

If a user wants to use nano, tmux, git, python, ruby, or whatever, they should be empowered to do so easily. Users shouldn't have to worry about package architecture, reinstall persistence, version mismatches, or any of the other common problems associated with extending the functionality of unraid.

 

Making things easier for the end user doesn't mean slapping everything into a GUI. It means solving the really dirty, hard problems that everyone sort of just copes with.

 

No one should have to care if I use nano on my machine, and I don't want to care if someone else uses tmux. I think we can all agree we don't want to pump up the core with things some people want and others are violently against (Personally, I'd much rather see foundational packages in the core that would allow users to install package like nano on their own more consistently, but I'm not holding my breath).