Happy 20th Birthday!

["Mike Smithson" <mdooligan gmail com>]

On Thu, 30 Oct 2014 05:00:05 -0700, <mc-devel-request gnome org> wrote:

> Today's Topics:
>
>    1. Happy 20th Birthday! (Egmont Koblinger)
>
> ...
>
> Sadly, as this post points out, mc almost died twice already ? and the
> really sad aspect that casts a shadow to the current birthday is that I
> personally feel it's dying again for the third time.
>
> The initial passion from the new maintainers has faded.  They hardly have
> time to work on the project.  Many patches or important bugreports go
> unnoticed for long months or even years.  Some tickets have heated
> technical discussions between some non-maintainers, yet the maintainers
> remain silent.  Some contributors have already expressed that they've  
> lost
> motivation due to the lack of response from developers, and alas more
> (including myself) are likely to follow.  (This whole issue has been  
> raised
> in [5].)  I really don't know how this problem could be solved... I'm  
> just
> hoping that we'll be able to figure out something.
>
> Anyways, for now, let's celebrate 20 years of Midnight Commander :)

1994? Yes, there are few records of the history of this obscure code.

I've been using mc since the days when it sucked. The 4.6 years were
pretty good, it worked well already, and some major things were hacked
out. 4.8 series is awesome. I got away from it for a few years, came
back, and some clever people had worked it right over. Sure, they missed
a few things, but the code cleanup was great.

Thank you who ever you are.

I would help, I have a bunch of patches I apply to every new version.

I don't understand the ticket system. I set one up, someone made a bizarre
reply to it, and that's all that happened. I even showed the exact code
that accomplished it. Nobody said yes or no, there was no dialog whether
it sucked or was good. Someone just told me to make a ticket. Sounds like
Russians to me. :)

I would love to help. Tell me how.

ps I like having my personal hacks for something like mc. It is my file
manager. I don't use Nautilus or whatever. Maybe mc-4.8.13 is getting very
close to as perfect as software can get. It is very effective.

I think forums work better than mailing lists. I want to frame things up
and respond to critique. And make it easy to do so. Developers *are* users.

mc is not Twinkies(tm) in crisp plastic wrap. It's more like something you
cook at home.

There ya go. Midnight Commander Cookbook.

A million magic hacks.




--
Peace and Cheer