Re: Things to do before 4.6.0

[Oskar Liljeblad <oskar osk mine nu>]

On Wednesday, June 26, 2002 at 05:29, Pavel Roskin wrote:

Hi Pavel!

> This is a list of things that I want to be done before the 4.6.0 release.  
> Unfortunately, I'm very busy both with my job and my personal life, and I
> feel that it's better to drop something from the plans (i.e. reschedule
> for the next release) than to delay the release indefinitely.
[..]
> 1) Review the outstanding patches in this list and apply them, unless they
> seem unstable or introduce new features.  Resubmitting of patches with
> more detailed comments would help, but is not required.

Did someone gather these patches do we have to go through the
whole list archive?
 
> 2) Checking for ncurses is wrong.  It should be possible to detect ncurses 
> if only curses.h can be included (no ncurses.h or ncurses/ncurses.h or 
> ncurses/curses.h).  Needed for QNX Neutrino.
> 
> 3) Implement syntax highlighting for ncurses.  Candidate to drop, because
> nobody who asked even tried to submit a patch.
> 
> 4) Compressed tarballs produced by "tar cz" with older versions of GNU tar
> (i.e. those with padding at the end) cannot be opened by pressing Enter
> ("doesn't look like a tar archive")

Can someone provide an example tarball?

> 5) When making local copies from remote VFS, preserve the original
> extension to satisfy some programs used in extfs (old versions of RPM).
> Candidate for drop.  Should be easy though.

This would be quite useful. (But not depending in extensions would
also be a good idea.)

> 6) Handle errors on FiSH.  Reading unreadable files causes a hang.  May be
> hard to fix, candidate to drop.
> 
> 7) When doing Ctrl-O in viewer or editor and typing "exit", the subshell
> is not restarted.  Code for restarting subshell is present but it's
> broken.  There are other symptoms of the problem.
> 
> 8) Don't show non-printable characters in the filenames.  It messes the
> screen and it's inconsistent with user settings for output.

I guess this is more of a bugfix, since some non-printable characters
are already printed correctly, aren't they? I've looked at that code,
and at the moment the set of printable characters depends on what your
terminal is. I'd rather like to use isprint for this.

Btw, I wrote a complete patch to remove xterm_flag and features based
on the value of the TERM envvar entirely from mc. (Instead it would
use the terminfo database in most cases.) Unfortunately there
were some complications: printable characters (as described above),
and xterm hintbar. It is AFAIK impossible to determine if a terminal
has a titlebar that can be changed only by using the terminfo database.
So I decided to not submit this patch...
 
> 9) Introduce a new variable for mc.ext that would expand to the filename 
> with the full path.  It's a new feature, but 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.
> 
> 10) Copying big files to FiSH causes file contents to be executed.  The 
> remote side expects less data than it actually gets.
> 
> 11) Super-long filenames in zip files (>8k) cause buffer overflow in VFS 
> code.

What's the technical solution here? Would it be necessary to have the VFS
believe the file has a shorter name? (In that case duplicates would need
to be checked too.)

Regards,

Oskar Liljeblad (oskar osk mine nu)