midnight commander reloaded (?)

[Pavel Tsekov]

On Wed, 10 May 2006, Jozef Riha wrote:

> Thanks to everybody for the inputs. Please let me put it down in a few
> sentences:
>
> * everyone admits midnight commander is anywhere but not close to
> rapid development pace with new features being added rather than being
> in a state where old code is maintained in a usable (compilable)
> condition. I went through TODO and unfortunately have not found any
> feature that would change my pesimistic point of view.

MC has a lot of features already. It is a file manager and as such it
does its job pretty well. What features do you miss ?

> * Full code rewrite/audit would be nice but will certainly not happen
> during one night. Moreover, nobody seems to be interested in this
> anyway.

Well have you given it a thought ? How would a rewrite in your case ?

> * Patches are coming but often they are so badly coded they cannot be
> included into the main source tree.

Patches are coming but not as often. I didn't say that the patches are
bad. It's more like the author of the patch focusues on this particular
feature that he wants added and doesn't want to see the whole picture.
Some of the patches are very intrusive and make the task of reviewing them
pretty hard.

> "Summer of Code"-like sponsorship would not probably work due to the
> complexity of the task, limited time and resources. Ok, but they ar
> e other ways of paying OSS developers. You have probably heard about
> Novell bounties (http://www.gnome.org/bounties/). Project goals are
> clearly stated together with the given conditions on how the code
> would be like, the level of documentation and the actual reward. Do
> you think this might work for
> mc? Of course, nobody would accept Novell to pay it but I believe the
> community would be able to gather some bread. As you may on Nove
> ll bounties page it somewhat helped to encourage the developers
> without none of them taking over the code maintenance.
>
> The individuals would send money to the trusted organization made
> around the mc developing community using paypal for instance, the
> actual amount of reward for a specific feature would be always
> publicly available and every developer would be able to jump on the
> train. Please, yet again share your opinions.

Are you representative of some kind of organization or a group of people ?
Have you investigated whether what you are suggesting would work ? 
Promising is not like giving...


P.S. My own opinion is that money would not make a better file manager.