src VS OpenVi

The OpenBSD project released 7.4 of their OS on 16 Oct 2023 as their 55th release 💫

Well since https://www.openbsd.org/ still says

> Only two remote holes in the default install, in a heck of a long time!

I'm assuming not, but I could always be mistaken.

> building a cat from scratch

> That would be an interesting project.

Here is the source code of the OpenBSD implementation of cat:

> https://github.com/openbsd/src/blob/master/bin/cat/cat.c

and here of the GNU coreutils implementation:

> https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/cat.c

Thus: I don't think building a cat from scratch or creating a tutorial about that topic is particularly hard (even though the HN audience would likely be interested in it). :-)

Browsing through the source history of /usr/src/usr.bin/tmux, it looks like this recent-ish commit is removing some checks for when ANSI color-probes and sending "tell me your color" sequences. Perhaps the culprit?

I can reproduce it. And this is the commit that causes the issue: https://github.com/openbsd/src/commit/d21788ce70be80e9c4ed0c52c149e01147c4a823

Actually, I got it wrong, too many vulnerabilities in flight. They did fix it: https://github.com/openbsd/src/commit/375ccafb2eb77de6cf240e...

This post shows how to install Drupal with PHP on OpenBSD, the solid OS. Here, Composer, the PHP package manager, is used with expectation that the update becomes easier.

OpenVi: Portable OpenBSD vi for Unix systems\ (22 comments)

Hi, I'm the "perpetrator" responsible for OpenVi. Apologies to everyone! /s

I've added details to the README to hopefully explain why it exists: https://github.com/johnsonjh/OpenVi#why

The OpenVi ChangeLog at https://raw.githubusercontent.com/johnsonjh/OpenVi/master/Ch... includes all the history going back to 1993's Nvi 0.93. Nvi 1.79 was released in 1996, which is the version from which OpenBSD's vi was derived.

This ChangeLog entries are only base summary of the commit messages - the full details are in OpenBSD's CVS tree, or viewable a bit easier via GitHub (https://github.com/openbsd/src/commits/master/usr.bin/vi)

Changes to the (bundled) OpenBSD regular expression engine are not included in the legacy ChangeLog, but you can see that development in the CVS tree or via GitHub as well (https://github.com/openbsd/src/commits/master/lib/libc/regex).

OpenVi also utilizes the OpenBSD version of Berkely DB (https://github.com/openbsd/src/commits/master/lib/libc/db).

It isn't really an "old" version of Nvi by any means - the development went in a different direction. OpenBSD's vi has been developed mostly independently since being imported back in 1999.

The documentation has been updated to explain the rationale - see https://github.com/johnsonjh/OpenVi#why

In those 23 years since, OpenBSD vi has diverged significantly from Nvi1 (as Nvi2 has diverged from Nvi1 as well).

It has grown much smaller and more compact - one might argue more focused.

Much of the code has been simplified and many features removed, rather than added. Still, it has adopted features and taken some fixes back from Nvi1/Nvi2 versions and other variants, such as adopting support for expandtab from NetBSD's variant.

The behavior of the traditional vi is much different than vim and other clones. Nvi was a actually a re-implementation of the traditional vi for 4BSD (to be clean of AT&T code) and thus was originally intended to be bug-for-bug compatible, but breaking away where the original vi behavior was nonsensical or terrible.

For vim, `set compatible` or `set cp` is close, but still not traditional vi by any means.

A multibyte variant of the tradition vi is maintained - https://github.com/n-t-roff/heirloom-ex-vi/.

Nvi (now on version 1.8x) is also maintained - https://repo.or.cz/nvi.git

Nvi2 is yet another fork of Nvi, https://github.com/lichray/nvi2

Despite the very similar names, all of these editors have a variety of different features, and are structured very differently.

Nvi has a concept of a front-end and a back-end (which uses the BDB database). OpenVi uses the OpenBSD version of Berkeley DB which derives from 1.85. Nvi (1.8x) provides a minimal version of code also derived from that release intended from use with Nvi, and (IIRC) also provides support for using Db3/4/5. Similar situation for Nvi2.

Nvi 1.8 has been structured where a third library layer has been added, which doesn't exist in OpenBSD's vi or OpenVi. There is scripting support (Tcl, Perl, etc.) and GUI code in the other various forks ... all of these support various different options as well.

I should probably make a matrix of these, but you can get an idea by looking at the settable options implemented in each of the variants (as they historically include a comment to document from where the option originated):

OpenVi: https://github.com/johnsonjh/OpenVi/blob/22c2a7022e31d91e09e...

OpenBSD vi: https://github.com/openbsd/src/blob/master/usr.bin/vi/common...

Nvi2: https://github.com/lichray/nvi2/blob/5fcdc13656500a8c5b4c073...

Nvi1: https://repo.or.cz/nvi.git/blob/HEAD:/common/options.c#l52