Towards 4.6.0 - progress report

[Pavel Roskin <proski gnu org>]

Hello!

We are a few steps closer to the next release.

Checking for ncurses has been fixed, /usr and /usr/local are no longer 
hardcoded, curses.h can be accepted as an ncurses header.

Syntax highlighting with ncurses has been implemented.  This feature was 
demanded many times.

Compresses tarballs with padding at the end are now properly recognized.

Exit from subshell in viewer and editor has been fixed, as well as the 
case when the subshell dies.  MC exits - that's not the best solution, but 
at least it's better than a loop using select() an utilizing 100% of CPU 
time.

The problem with copying big files to fish has been worked around by using 
256 byte blocks in dd instead of 4k blocks.  Better fix would be nice, but 
it's good enough for 4.6.0.

Remaining issues:

1) When making local copies from remote VFS, preserve the original
extension to satisfy some programs used in extfs (old versions of RPM).

2) Handle errors on FiSH.  Reading unreadable files causes a hang.

3) Don't show non-printable characters in the filenames.  It messes the
screen and it's inconsistent with user settings for output.

4) Introduce a new variable for mc.ext that would expand to the filename
with the full path.  Mozilla and OpenOffice.org need it, since they don't
default to the current directory.  %d/%p doesn't create local copies, so
it's not a solution.

5) Super-long filenames in zip files (>8k) cause buffer overflow in VFS 
code.

Any help with the above issues will be appreciated.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin