Re: midnight commander reloaded (?)

[Pavel Roskin <proski gnu org>]

On Thu, 2006-05-11 at 10:29 +0300, Pavel Tsekov wrote:
> On Wed, 10 May 2006, Pavel Roskin wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, 2006-05-10 at 14:53 +0200, Jozef Riha wrote:
> >> "Summer of Code"-like sponsorship would not probably work due to the
> >> complexity of the task, limited time and resources.
> >
> > There is one thing that may work.  We could ask to rewrite mc in another
> > programming language as proof of maturity of that language.  I hope some
> 
> For what purpose ? If someone wanted to have a file manager in language 
> XYZ he would have done so already.

Not necessarily.  There are many great things that have never been
written.

> Every now and then someone jumps in and starts complaining that he would 
> want this and that added to MC and without those very IMPORTANT features
> MC is just crap. Then they start to speculate how rewriting MC would pave
> the way and so on and so on...

That's not about me.

>  Why don't these people just start 
> contributing - either by suggesting ideas and ways to implement them or by 
> actually writing code ?!

I'm suggesting an idea how to use a "Summer of Code" like process and
get an acceptable result.  I'm not sure it will happen, but if it will,
it shouldn't be a waste of resources.

> > Maybe it should be permitted to modify an existing project (I believe
> > there is a file manager in Python) to match all significant features of
> > mc.  Although non-Python programmers would be at disadvantage in this
> > case.
> 
> I've tried ZC (Zemljanka Commander) at one point and I wasn't very 
> fascinated. It is written in Python if I remember correctly and uses
> GTK+/Gnome for the GUI. I am not sure but maybe one of the authors
> used to work on MC in the past.

As far as I can see, only plugins are in Python.  The code is in C.

The project clearly needs some work.  Some of the tarballs clearly
didn't come from "make distcheck".  config.guess in avfs is from year
1996 and doesn't know about x86_64.  The "Copyright" tag in *.spec files
is obsolete.

But the C code looks quite good.  The functions are quite short and easy
to understand.

Now I'm quite sure that modification of the existing projects should be
permitted.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin