Re: Midnight Commander mod with Colorer-take5 syntax engine

[Pavel Tsekov <ptsekov gmx net>]

On Wed, 21 Jun 2006, Leonard den Ottolander wrote:

> > There are also some questions which I believe should be discussed.
> > At first there is one C++ file in this mod (to link with c++ colorer
> > code). As far as I understand MC uses C only. Is this a problem?
>
> Yes, it might. The overall approach towards accepted language constructs
> is a bit conservative to maintain compatibility with older systems.
> Would it be much work to rewrite these parts?

Yes it will take a lot of work - colorer is written entirely in C++ .
Thus there is a thin wrapper to translate from C to C++ and vice
versa. In my opinion this is not a big deal and a necessary sacrifice.
For system which do not have C++ support obviously colorer syntax 
highlighting would be disabled by configure.

Since I have tried to embed colorer in MC in the past I have
configure code that deals with those issues.

> > Another is that this mod dynamically links to the libcolorer - this
> > means that to use it, colorer library should be installed in system.
> > This introduces MC additional dependency.
>
> This is why I do not want to make colorer the default. I think this is
> something we should leave to the distributions.

This we are not going to make it the default (at least not at this time).
This can be achieved with configure too - I have code for that too.

I still haven't looked at the patch that Igor sent today but I'll
do that as soon as I get some free time. I am willing to make the
necessary changes to MC to adopt Igor's patch. I think patch has great
value.