Re: Makeing the subshell reliable

[Oswald Buddenhagen <ossi kde org>]

On Thu, Jul 13, 2006 at 09:58:08PM +0300, Pavel Tsekov wrote:
> On Thu, 13 Jul 2006, Oswald Buddenhagen wrote:
> >On Thu, Jul 13, 2006 at 04:29:35PM +0300, Pavel Tsekov wrote:
> >>There are several features which are consistent source of problems:
> >>
> >>My opinion is that we should remove both features from the subshell.
> >>
> >>   * the subshell prompt retrieval - this one is widely known to be
> >>     unreliable.
> >>
> >could you be more precise about that? do you mean the shell's cwd or the
> >actual prompt string?
> 
> The shell prompt string itself.
> 
ok. maybe it would make sense to implement an own bash-compatible PS1
interpreter. trying to make sense of almost arbitrary program output
sort of has to fail.

> >>   * execution of commands typed at MC's prompt widget trough the
> >>     subshell
> >>
> >read my lips: NO WAY IN HELL. ;)
> >this is one of the few actual selling points of mc over all the other
> 
> The prompt widget or the fact that if the subshell is enabled commands
> are executed trough the subshell ? Don't get me wrong - I want to keep
> the prompt widget. What I propose is to handle commands typed at it
> just as if the subshell is disabled. I cannot see how commands typed
> at the prompt and executed trough the subshell give MC an advantage
> over the other file managers.
> 
the fact that i can switch the panels on and off at any time - without
losing the command's output.
what would be really perfect would be what we had in norton commander,
where the nc prompt just pretended to be the shell prompt, giving the
possibility to freely toggle the panels while constructing a command,
having the same history, etc. - however, emulating a typical unix
shell's interactive command set is unrealistic, and embedding the real
shell's prompt into the panel view seems outright impossible, esp.
given the current problems.

> >the only problem i have is mc permanently
> >mis-detecting that the shell is busy, but that is worked around by
> >"ctrl-o enter ctrl-o alt-p enter".
> 
> The problem that I was debugging - it was related to this feature. In 
> short: [...]
> 
yes, i remember that discussion pretty well. it's, indeed, no simple
problem.

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