Re: New mcedit and old edit.indent.rc

[Pavel Roskin <proski gnu org>]

Hello!

> New mcedit cannot format sources with old edit.indent.rc.
> It says "~/.mc/cedit/edit.indent.rc: : No such file or directory".
> It seems a lot of people will be in trouble, if only new mc executable 
> will be installed (for testing) with old system wide edit.indent.rc.

Fixed by restoring the third argument and making it /dev/null.  This is 
not a complete fix, since the user won't be notified, the scripts won't be 
updated, and the errors will be ignored.

Fortunately, 4.5.55 was using ~/.cedit, so it's only the upgrade from 
4.6.0-pre1 to later versions that will cause the trouble.

The fundamental reason for this problem is a "paradigm shift" since the
time when the bulk of the code was written.  The original authors
considered mc as a program for "hackers", who would tweak every
configuration file.  That's why mc creates local files whenever some
feature is used - this is done to give the user a local configuration to
play with.

The reality is that most users don't check their configurations files.  
When they update the program, they don't erase the .mc directory.  And 
then the local copies become a problem.  There is no way to know if they 
have modifications made by the user or not.

I believe that in the future we should take another approach.  Most files
should be global.  Whenever the user wants to customize something, it's
his/her responsibility to make a local copy.  And by the way, "Auto save
setup" should be off by default, and all settings should be read from
mc.lib.

Also it would be nice to make all configuration files versioned.  
However, mc should not automatically upgrade files with an old version (as
it's done with the Syntax file) - it should just warn about it.

I don't know if I'll do this before 4.6.0, but it will be done some day.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin