Greetings,
the updater just asked me if I wanted to replace vi with ex-vi-compat. I looked at the repo and the dependencies, but I really don’t understand what all that is good for and information seems very sparse. Any ideas? Do I want this? 
Why?
TIA
This might shine some light on what this is all about.
https://www.baeldung.com/linux/vi-ex-mode
If you don’t use vim you probably will not notice any difference I guess.
Thanks for your reply. However, I don’t think that’s it. I do use vim and generally know what the ex mode is, but this seems to be something else. Something about POSIX-user-portability, which I have not found out what it is,yet. I don’t have vi or vim installed from pacman. I use the neovim-nightly via bob.
sudo pacman -Qi vi
There it is. Thanks! 
Why do I have this? And in which cases would I want to replace it with ex-vi-compat?
I’m not sure why you’re being asked if you want to replace it. It came from the AUR, because I got this when checking for updates…
packages not in aur: vi
So I just removed it.
It looks like Arch is replacing the vi package with a vi command that leverages vim instead.
The reason you have vi installed is probably because we install it by default.
No, it was always in the regular repos. But since it has been removed from the regular repos, pacman treats it as a foreign package - and pacman always assumes that foreign packages are (or were) AUR packages.
Additional info: Since the default is “Y” and I didn’t expect it to do any harm after understanding what it’s for, I confirmed the installation. What happens then is that it installs this package, uninstalls vi and installs vim and vim-runtime.
I did some checking and I was expecting my Arm build image script to bomb out with a package not found. It didn’t. Then I burned the image to a uSD card and finished installing Plasma.
Once in plasma I entered
[don@RPi-5 ~]$ pacman -Q vi
ex-vi-compat 1-3
If I enter vi in a terminal it runs ex-vi-compat
So for now, they must have a symlink that directs vi to ex-vi-compat, I wonder how long the symlink will be there?
Pudge
It isn’t a symlink, it is a script. The point of that package is to provide vi and ex replacements. I don’t think it would be removed. I don’t think it is transitional.
Just a short question. I didn’t updated my system so vi is still there. Is it safe to remove vi package? Or is it needed for EOS?
It isn’t required for EOS
Thanks again, @dalto ! 
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