Re: midnight bug - feature request

[Pavel Roskin <proski gnu org>]

Hello!

> I'm using the latest snapshot, the bug is the same in the last days. As
> I can remember, the same bug happened to me a long time ago, but I can't
> remember clearly. The system is a Debian 3.0, the program was builded
> from source. I use it remotely, from a PUTTY client (it's on a server).
> The version in the Debian distribution works well, without any problem.
> If you have any other questions about my configuration, please tell me.

I have never seen anything like that.  It's almost certainly a bug in
putty.  I need the version of putty, the value of the TERM environment
variable (echo $TERM) and the output of "mc -V", so that I don't spend
time guessing.  It would be great if you test other terminal programs and
compare results.  If you are using a custom terminfo entry, I'd like to
see the output of infocmp (you can compress and attach it, as it can be
long).

> And the feature request: I miss some (i think) easy to implement feature
> from the editor. First of all, the most important for me is to save the
> position of the cursor when I leave a file, and when I go back, start at
> the same position.

Please give more details.  Should it be a separate command (save cursor
position) or you envision it as an option for all files?  Should every mc
process have its own remembered positions or they should be shared between
processes?

> The other is a small modification on "bracket matching". Currently, when
> I'm on a bracket, it shows the other bracket. My request is, that I'm
> after (maybe before) a bracket, show the other.

This functionality is already present.  If you could not find it, please
explain where you where looking, so that this feature can be made more
visible.

If you are not satisfied with the existing functionality, then please
explain the reasons.

> I've read in the archive, that somebody else has asked for position
> saving before. You told, that there's no really need for it. I don't
> think so: all the people I know using Midnight told me during our
> conversations, that it would be a good feature.

Just because somebody said so in the list, it doesn't mean that it's true,
myself included.

There is one thing that can stand in the way if you want to do position
saving across different instances of mc.  We need locking for
configuration files.  Also the configuration file should be written to a
temporary file and then copied to the permanent location.  This is
important, but not really simple, and will require serious testing.

> Other features (but I know that is not so easy to implement) are to make
> Midnight a full-featured IDE for programming. Auto completition, code
> hinting, etc. I think you just need to make an API and create a plugin
> system, and make _able_ MC to do it, and a lot off volunteer will do it.
> That's why I think, that FAR Manager is the best commander clone. ;) But
> the problem with it, that it's do it on Win... :(

The great thing about open source is that we don't have to keep the API
stable.  It can evolve together with the plugins.  The plugins can be
updated when the API is updated.

I'm not so optimistic about volunteers.  I'm doing some code cleanup to
make it easier to make extensive changes to the codebase, but I haven't
seen much interest in doing such changes from those who actually can.

Perhaps a part of the problem is that mc is in the stabilization phase
(for a very long time, actually), so that developers don't expect their
changes to be accepted now.  This should change too with the release of
4.6.0, but as it stands now, I only have time to fix one issue per week,
and another release-critical issue appears in the meantime.

I don't see many volunteers who would help me with such simple problems as
redirection of stderr in extfs scripts.  I don't think we can expect many
people doing much harder things like syntax completion.  I'd like to be
proven wrong.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin