Mc Digest, Vol 67, Issue 6
chris glur
crglur at gmail.com
Sun Nov 8 08:45:02 UTC 2009
>> My oberon [the good OS] collaborator, friend sent the CD from the other
>> side of the world. So It's home made.
>OK, if this CD is home-made, then how come this has to do
>with Debian? It might be based on Debian, but this mysterious
>collaborator might have introduced changes, which had some
>subtile side-effects, e.g. like breaking bundled mc package.
Yes it might depend on the 'ghost in the box' too, but I take a
probibalistic approach:
= I've installed mc on Slak3, RH6.2; Slak?; Mandrake9; FC1, mulinux...
all with no problems.
= I've got both Etch & Lenny CD's from the "mysterious collaborator"
and both indicate an elaborated 'checking for uncorrupted files' procedure
before/during installation.
= The Debian documentation ACTIVELY encourages user duplication of their CDs.
= I found myself uncomfortable with Debian documentation: the subtle, difficult
to explain feeling of a socialist english school teacher is summarised in the
'aptitude' user interface.
Compare aptitude, which you'd only use to install/update; with mc which you've
used a million times since DOS/nc, and note that aptitude has screens of menus.
Like the unduly controlling school-teacher, aptitude-developers take themselves
too serious, in expecting you to learn the screens of menu instuctions which
has no other value except for THEIR seldom used product.
> What's the problem with downloading the original Debian CD and trying
> whether it works or not before putting the blame on Debian?
You don't want/need to know my circumstamces which differ from what
you are familiar with. And I suspect that if I wanted to "get married
to Debian" by investing resources to familiarise myself with their
different way of doing it, all would work. I DO suspect that their emphasis
on security is good for beginners. Personally I always run as root. Life is
just too short. Since the only lasting asset is your knowledge, one should
not get married to a product. mc's secret was that it leaveraged the
universally appicable design principles of Norton's commander.
>I don't think it makes any sense for us to try to support you to get
>some ancient version of the software that you've got from some broken
>home-made CD (origins unknown) to work.
Are you the chairman/controller of "us"?
Is this mail-list different from others which are based on collaboration?
If you want to SHOW that you can SUPPORT then tell how would I set my
'bash mini-mc' so that when it quits, it doesn't pwd back to the dir from
where it ran. Actually I believe mc does this too, and it's a fact of the
kernel. So you need a higher/more-global 'environment' where pwd can be
stored. It seems that gpm uses a very 'Hi' environment, since it even
operates across chroot/s.
I guess the DebLenny-2009 CD has the newest version of mc that I'll ever use
in my life. In principle, I prefer to wait for a few years untill a product
has prove itself, like mc did.
== TIA.
More information about the mc
mailing list