MC for Win32 revival
Pavel Roskin
proski at gnu.org
Mon Oct 29 06:11:13 UTC 2001
Hello, Miguel!
> > 1. Who else is interrested (or even active) in reviving the Win32 Port ?
> > 1a. Any interrest in building mc with M$-VC++ or Borland C++ (otherwise I
> > will only support mingw-gcc )
>
> I would like to see MC running on Windows. Although I am wondering if
> it is not just trivial to port it using Cygwin?
Not only is it trivial, but I even tested MC on Cygwin days before
releasing 4.5.55 and it compiled with very minor fixes that I committed
before the release.
MC works quite well on Cygwin, but it sees the system from the UNIX
standpoint. It doesn't know about drives and represents permissions in
the UNIX form.
Another more technical problem was that both editor and the viewer
displayed some useless warnings and required some tricks to be used.
This may have been a problem with the regex implementation in Cygwin. It
could also be caused by the interference between the system regex and the
regex implementation included with MC (src/regex.c).
The "native" port (as opposed to the trivial Cygwin port) addresses the
issues of the drives and the permissions. It also uses the native S-Lang
support for the host OS instead of relying on the escape sequences. It
supports Win32 and OS/2. Open-sourced EMX and mingw are among the
supported compilers.
The problem is that the native port is broken and doesn't compile. The
makefiles don't know anything about glib. Also the file lists in the
makefiles need to be updated.
Unfortunately, there has been no interest to the native PC port from the
developers ("YES!!!!! Thank you thank you" doesn't count). If I had a
working Win32 or OS/2 system around I would probably fix it, but it's not
the case.
A word of caution. Windows users have a different mentality and don't
generally understand the idea of free software. Whoever works on the port
may be a subject of spiteful personal e-mail ("you $%$#% program doesn't
work") and shameless support requests ("where do I get the fixed binary").
I've had enough of such e-mail just for merging some OS/2 and Win32 code,
rewriting the makefiles and minor changes to the code. It is not a big
deal if you are prepared, but please _be_ prepared.
--
Regards,
Pavel Roskin
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