Docs updated & some GPL issues

Pavel Roskin proski at gnu.org
Tue Oct 29 22:58:31 UTC 2002


Hi, David!

I've applied your patches.  Thank you!  Do you have write access to CVS
now?

> - On the other hand, we can't get rid of the .TP at the head of the
> options if we want proper indenting of first option.

Thanks!  My error.

> - There some minor differences between our COPYING file and the actual
> GPL.

I've removed it from CVS, so that automake will install it.

> - Help files reproduce these differences and show an outdated address. I
> made a separate patch to apply it to the different localized help files.

Maybe man2hlp should insert the COPYING file automatically?

> - There's a funny ^L shown in the help text GPL in xnc.hlp.

It's present in the text on GPL.  Another reason not to trust humans (to
create xnc.hlp) :-)

> - How will the maintainer know how to localize the date in the man pages
> before the release?

I have fixed maint/RELEASE_PROCEDURE to make it clear that only the
English manual needs to be updated.

> - With mc -w you get:
>     -w: unknown option
>     
> Could we have something like: ?
>     mc: unknown option '-w'

I wish we could, but "unknown option" in poptStrerror() has no "%s" and 
some languages may require the option name to be in the middle or even in 
the beginning.  You cannot glue '-w' at the end without ":" and expect it 
to sound right in every language.

How about this?  (Should be easy to do, see handle_args() in main.c)
mc: unknown option: '-w'

> This is what I get under Mandrake:
> -bash: cd: GNU Midnight Commander 2002-10-25-05
> .: No such file or directory

It's that ugly -P option.  Too bad many people will complain if I remove
it.  It should write the last directory to a temprorary file, and the
shell wrapper should be able to deal with the case when such file is
missing.

The original idea that mc will write the last directory always was wrong -
it makes the code ugly (every time mc exists, it should take care of that
stupid script, no matter if mc just prints help), prevents using stdout
and creates a security risk if some subprocesses write something bad to
stdout.

Fixing -P is in the TODO list.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin




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