Re: mc-4.5.55 is now part of the Cygwin net distribution

["Alexander Varakin" <avarakin00 hotmail com>]

Hi Pavels,

I think it will be a very good idea to port the latest snapshot.

I built MC from snapshot about 3 months ago and I was having the following
problems:
0. regex.c - fixed by me
1. subshell dies after few Ctrl-O, then mc dies. It happens very quickly
under rxvt or xterm, but if started from DOS box, it works for quite a
while, but then it still eventually dies.
I doubt this is a cygwin problem, because the well known unix  "screen"
works under cygwin without any problems, although it also uses pty's. Maybe
it is a good idea to see the sources of screen and find out how the subshell
must be done.

2. MC barks on  'pagefile.sys' :
************************************************
File 'pagefile.sys' exists but can not be stat-ed: Permission denied
************************************************
This is actually a general problem, I saw it on unixes as well, but it is
very annoying under cygwin.

3. editor and viewer don't work properly on filesystem, mounted in text
mode, editor even corrupts files in DOS encoding.
The solution is to change mc editor to open all files in binary mode using
"w+b" method.
Even if to do so, there is a problem with ^M's at the ends of lines, which
are invisible and can be easily mixed up with text and screw up the file.
This is also common problem with unix if one has to edit files in dos
encoding.
I was having a lot of trouble because of this since all C++ files in our
clearcase are in DOS encoding.
I saw some remains of code in MC which are supposed to do some CR-LF
translation, I tried to enable it, but mc just crashed.
Pavel, any suggestions how this can be fixed properly?

4. The border lines are screwed up while running inside DOS box or rxvt. Not
a big deal, but not aesthetic.

I would be very happy to take part in cygwin port, I will try to fix the
editor.

Alex



----- Original Message -----
From: "Pavel Roskin" <proski gnu org>
To: "Pavel Tsekov" <ptsekov gmx net>
Cc: <mc-devel gnome org>
Sent: Tuesday, July 09, 2002 12:21 PM
Subject: Re: mc-4.5.55 is now part of the Cygwin net distribution


> Hi, Pavel!
>
> > I thought it would be a good idea to drop a note - as of today the the
> > Midnight Commander has been included in the Cygwin net distribution.
>
> Very good news.
>
> > I'm the one which will actually maintain the Cygwin package for MC. I've
> > used the last officialy released MC version for the Cygwin port.
> > Actually it is hard to call it a port, since it compiles OOB on current
> > (1.3.12) cygwin and I haven't done any Cygwin specific changes to the
> > code - yet :)
> >
> > I've just red the official MC announcement posted back in August 2001
> > and I noticed that it talks about some kind of troubles using the
> > viewer/editor. I don't really share this experience although the code
> > base is the same.
>
> The problem is that MC was using some internal regex functions from
> regex.c file included with the distribution.  This should be fixed now.
>
> You may be lucky if your libc has different names for the functions
> used in regex.c.
>
> > Are you aware of any other problems which MC might have on Cygwin ? I'd
> > like to know of them so I can help improve MC for that platform.
>
> I haven't compiled it on Cygwin for a long time, but I think problems with
> line endings still need to be worked on.
>
> Prompt loading from the subshell doesn't work well on any OS, but it may
> be more broken on less UNIX-like systems, including Cygwin.
>
> VFS is a big mess, and I don't think it works well on Cygwin, if at all.
>
> > Currently the most annoying problem I'm aware of is the subshell
> > support, which if used, causes MC to hang. This is a Cygwin issue and
> > I'm working to fix it.
>
> Please try the current snapshot from
> http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/utils/file/managers/mc/snapshots/
>
> I fixed a related bug recently.  Basically, there is a list of file
> descriptors to be monitored, and one of them is used to load prompt from
> the subshell.  This descriptor wasn't removed from the list if the
> subshell died for any reason.
>
> It may be easier to fix subshell now if it still doesn't work, because you
> won't get 100% CPU utilization in get_event().
>
> > There was also a nasty bug, when using MAD compiled MC - as long as I
> > remember a memory address pointing to malloc()-ed memory is passed to
> > the MAD free incremented by 4. This issue caused a nasty crash when
> > closing the MC editor. I spent some time to identify that this is a MAD
> > problem, but havent actully traced the source of the problem - just
> > disabled MAD :( Maybe you're already aware of that one...
>
> A lot of work has been done on MAD by Andrew V. Samoilov <kai cmail ru>
> If you still get this error with the the snapshot, please give more
> details.
>
> > Last thing - I suppose that many things have changed after the last
> > official release was made - is it possible to resume any of the most
> > important changes ?
>
> http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/mc/NEWS?raw=1
>
> --
> Regards,
> Pavel Roskin
>
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