Re: [ANN] mc^2

["Yury V. Zaytsev" <yury shurup com>]

Hi,

I've briefly had a look at mc^2, and I have to say that I was really
blown away by mooffie's work! I would be very happy if this can be
integrated into the master branch (mooffie can fix my pet peeve, the
gnome-terminal open directory thing in recent distros with just a few
lines of code!).

I feel that scripting is a vastly superior solution to the extensibility
problem in the context of mc as compared to plugins. Of course, plugins
have their uses, but they will require so much more effort to build and
maintain, whereas scenarios for a scripting engine that exposes mc
internals through a very thin layer are quick to write, easy to debug
and need no compilation.

Slava, what do you think? I know that you've been a proponent of the
plugin system, but aren't you impressed with this demonstration?

> From the maintenance point of view, it would be great if most of the
tickets asking for "niceties" could be implemented in a high level
language outside of the core of mc, or maybe even in a longer term more
non-essential features that are currently in the core could be offloaded
to scripts, freeing up resources for important infrastructural projects
like broken regexes.

We could ship a default library of scripts with some active out of the
box, and others requiring opt-in (symlink). Think of no more arguments
about changing the "gold" default behavior, or adding more configuration
options...

In addition to that, we could make an official script repository with
rather loose inclusion criteria (basically, script is maintained &
compatible with the latest version of mc, and maintainer demonstrates
minimal amounts of sanity), which distro packagers could ship as a
separate addon, like they do e.g. with bundles of vim plugins.

Anyways, how do we move from there on? I'm afraid that personally I lack
competence and time to do a proper code review to help the process :-(

-- 
Sincerely yours,
Yury V. Zaytsev