midnight commander reloaded (?)

[Pavel Tsekov]

On Thu, 11 May 2006, Pavel Roskin wrote:

> On Thu, 2006-05-11 at 10:29 +0300, Pavel Tsekov wrote:
>> On Wed, 10 May 2006, Pavel Roskin wrote:
>>
>>> On Wed, 2006-05-10 at 14:53 +0200, Jozef Riha wrote:
>>>> "Summer of Code"-like sponsorship would not probably work due to the
>>>> complexity of the task, limited time and resources.
>>>
>>> There is one thing that may work.  We could ask to rewrite mc in another
>>> programming language as proof of maturity of that language.  I hope some
>>
>> For what purpose ? If someone wanted to have a file manager in language
>> XYZ he would have done so already.
>
> Not necessarily.  There are many great things that have never been
> written.

Sure, but if someone wanted it so badly he/she would have done something 
about it already. It is not like the several MC developers address the 
public and suddenly an amazing new file manager is born. If those few 
members cannot fuel their own project how are they supposed to drive 
others to get the job done.

>> Every now and then someone jumps in and starts complaining that he would
>> want this and that added to MC and without those very IMPORTANT features
>> MC is just crap. Then they start to speculate how rewriting MC would pave
>> the way and so on and so on...
>
> That's not about me.

When I wrote that I didn't mean you, but as I think about it -  it 
is about you too. You use every opportunity to suggest a rewrite and
to lend MC to some other project. Not so long ago it was Crusader, now it 
is a SOC approach. As maintainer you should share your thoughts on the
future of MC - the way you see it. From what I see you are not too 
enthusiastic.

>>> Maybe it should be permitted to modify an existing project (I believe
>>> there is a file manager in Python) to match all significant features of
>>> mc.  Although non-Python programmers would be at disadvantage in this
>>> case.
>>
>> I've tried ZC (Zemljanka Commander) at one point and I wasn't very
>> fascinated. It is written in Python if I remember correctly and uses
>> GTK+/Gnome for the GUI. I am not sure but maybe one of the authors
>> used to work on MC in the past.
>
> As far as I can see, only plugins are in Python.  The code is in C.

Well I don't remember how it was all set up but I think they had an 
embedded python interpreter. I remember the config files were python 
scripts themself... I might be wrong though.

> The project clearly needs some work.  Some of the tarballs clearly
> didn't come from "make distcheck".  config.guess in avfs is from year
> 1996 and doesn't know about x86_64.  The "Copyright" tag in *.spec files
> is obsolete.
>
> But the C code looks quite good.  The functions are quite short and easy
> to understand.
>
> Now I'm quite sure that modification of the existing projects should be
> permitted.

So are you suggesting that we should shut down MC and switch to some other
project ? If there are things that we like in other file managers we 
should just adopt them in one way or another.