A proposal for Midnight Commander

[Ali Akcaagac <aliakc web de>]

Hi,

I know this may be a delicate point to discuss but I would like to
propose that MC becomes independant to glib again.

Reasons for this:

Some years ago where Midnight Commander became some sort of Console and
Desktop Filemanager (for GNOME) it made sense using libraries that came
with the Desktop in this case it was glib. A lot of wrappers for simple
types and a bunch of new functions like linked lists, hash tables and
stuff usually not found inside glibc or other standard c libraries used
on other plattforms.

A few weeks/months we saw some people announcing MC forks such as Arpi
did with his Midnight Commander fork and someone else who continued with
4.1.40 (which is glib free).

I have been thinking about this for quite some time and indeed it does
make sense. Look MC is an all purpose filemanager (if not the best
around for all sorts of open source architectures). People load it up,
do their job and quit it again.

But have we ever thought about rescue systems ? such like bootable
rescue CD's or other situations ?. Let's look at rescue CD's for a
moment. The aim for such a CD is to keep things tiny (small sized, less
library dependencies if possible statically linked). Midnight Commander
in it's current state is maturing and using a lot of libraries these
days (libglib and libgmodule) for example, this means we need to provide
these libraries as well. Not to mention what we all need to get MC
compiled. Say if we create a rescue system and want to use uClibc we
then try to depend on as less stuff as possible. Currently we need
pkg-config installed to compile glib and if we build a new system in a
chroot then we need to compile quite some stuff before being able to use
Midnight Commander, specially in critical situations when we really
urgently need a filemanager.

Say on my system (only to give a practical example). I have my GTK/GNOME
installation kept in /usr/local this also means my 'mc' which I checkout
once a week or something. When I compile GNOME from scratch (this then
also includes all the other stuff, pkgconfig, startup-notification,
libxml, libxslt, audiofile etc. before it comes to glib it needs to
compile a few other things first. During that time I have no mc
available or can't use it due the fact that my /usr/local dir is moved
to /usr/local.bak a new /usr/local is being created where all the new
GNOME stuff is being installed

****(well let's not get deeper into why it's backup'ed, simply take the
situation where it's not able to access mc anymore which happens for
many people quite often - assuming even you). ****

I think there are quite some people here who simply trapped themselves
into such a situation every now and then and wished that mc would not
depend on glib for example and only depend on the core libraries such as
glibc for example. I think we should talk about this for a while and imo
it does make a lot of sense. If we simply go and accept glib as some
defacto standard library met on every system then we soon gonna accept
every library to be standard and make mc become more complicated (maybe
not now but maybe one day).

http://mc.linuxinside.com/
http://www1.mplayerhq.hu/~arpi/amc/

provided two links of recent mc forks.