Happy 20th Birthday!
Egmont Koblinger
egmont at gmail.com
Wed Oct 29 20:07:54 UTC 2014
Recently I did some digging about the history of mc. It's unclear when the
first version was released, the oldest I could find is mc-0.3 released on
Apr 29, 1994 [1].
Version 1.0, the first one bearing the name "Midnight Commander" was
released on Oct 29, 1994 [2]; exactly 20 years ago. (If you wonder what
the original name was: check out the links!)
A short blog entry from its author is at [3].
A very long, interesting story about mc's history can be read at [4].
Sadly, as this post points out, mc almost died twice already – and the
really sad aspect that casts a shadow to the current birthday is that I
personally feel it's dying again for the third time.
The initial passion from the new maintainers has faded. They hardly have
time to work on the project. Many patches or important bugreports go
unnoticed for long months or even years. Some tickets have heated
technical discussions between some non-maintainers, yet the maintainers
remain silent. Some contributors have already expressed that they've lost
motivation due to the lack of response from developers, and alas more
(including myself) are likely to follow. (This whole issue has been raised
in [5].) I really don't know how this problem could be solved... I'm just
hoping that we'll be able to figure out something.
Anyways, for now, let's celebrate 20 years of Midnight Commander :)
[1] http://www.informatica.co.cr/linux-desktops/research/1994/0504.html
[2] http://www.informatica.co.cr/linux-desktops/research/1994/1031.html
[3] http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2009/Oct-06.html
[4] http://www.softpanorama.org/OFM/Paradigm/Ch04/mc.shtml
[5] https://www.midnight-commander.org/ticket/3004
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