Re: removing the obsolete gnome (gmc) support?

[Pavel Roskin <proski gnu org>]

> sure. i was busy 24/7 with mplayer development and with my job in the rest.

That's very much appreciated.

> > I'm glad to welcome you in our team.  The existence of AMC was an
> > important argument for removing the GNOME frontend.  Your expertize will
>
> Eh. I'm really surprised :)

It was a clear indicator that something wrong was going on with the
project.  Another reason was the appearance of gmc alternatives, such as
Nautilus and Gentoo.

> I thought that 4.5.xx is the current version, and its bugs are not fixed
> there since years because no one develops mc nowadays or they're all
> working on the gmc part :)

Exactly the opposite is true.  Nobody is working on gmc.  In fact, nobody
was seriously working on gmc even by the time when 4.5.55 was released.

As for the text edition, I wanted to release 4.6.0 much earlier, but it
was a heavy race against bugs.  As soon as somebody was fixed, another
critical bug was reported.  Sometimes it seemed that I'm losing the race,
but finally I could concentrate and deal with the remaining issues.

Of course, a lot of stuff was moved to the TODO file.  We also have a bug
tracking system and a patch manager on savannah.gnu.org.  There are still
serious problems in the code, such as an unsafe rewriting of the config
files without locking and doing backups.

There is a lot of work to be done.  4.6.0 is just the beginning.

> It is the reason why i planned to fork or start a new project from
> scratch.

Please avoid forking by all means.  If you have problems with the current
code, I'd like to hear from you.

> It's amazing to see that it's still under development and the goal is
> again making a stable bugfree console tool instead of yet another
> winblows-exploder or win-commander clone for gnome/X.

It's quite natural, actually.  GNU Midnight Commander doesn't have major
competitors in the free software world.  And it's a tool of choice for
many programmers and system administrators.  Once I got a patch over ICQ
from my former sysadmin :-)

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin