Proposal for simplification

[Pavel Roskin <proski gnu org>]

Hello!

I believe one thing that makes mc so hard to maintain is the amount of
various compile time options.  While it may be cool to have support for
e.g. ncurses or for a 5 years old version of gettext, changes do break
code, and the more options we try to support, the more likely is the
breakage.  In particular, writing correct configuration scripts is hard
and not rewarding, i.e. no matter how much time you invest, things will
break for someone a few months later.

I believe mc is an established project that can dictate some
dependencies to those who want to compile it.  Since all the
dependencies are free software, it's only matter of getting and
installing them.

I suggest that we do following:

1) Support only S-Lang 2 and only as an external library.  Those who
need mc will get S-Lang.  I know, this is pretty harsh, but the next
release is probably months away, and S-Lang 2 will be ubiquitous by
then.

2) Drop support for non-VFS builds.  When we have reports that VFS was
ported to Win32, there is no point to keep it optional.  VFS could also
provide an intermediate layer for the local filesystem - that's
something we cannot do when VFS is optional.

3) Support only versions of gettext that have ngettext(), i.e. drop
gettext 0.10.x.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin