Re: "mc is over!?"

["Mike Smithson" <mdooligan gmail com>]

Bah. Mc is not "over". Things change, that's all.

I've been into mc since I don't know when. The first time I
used it. Mid/late 90s I'm guessing. I saw how it floundered
in the 4.6 series. I shrugged and kept tweaking and hacking my
version. A few years went by and I looked it up again, purely
out of curiosity.

I was delighted that someone had given it a full work over into
the 4.8 series. There were some persistent, puzzling, and very
annoying bugs that are now gone.

Excellent work, gentlemen. Thank you very much.

My list of personal patches went from ~30 down to ~5, where they
sit now, mostly minor interface tweaks. Mc works, and it works
very well. If development stagnates for a while, so be it. There
is actually very little to do. Mc is as close to perfect as
software gets. There will always be bugs and minor tweaks, and
that's what needs to be worked on, now and forever.

Yes, mc in its current incarnation is a model from the 1990s. I
like it that way. I'm not a big fan of C++. I also don't like
eye candy in a tool that is all about functionality and utility,
and I very much appreciate a file manager that can operate when
XWindows cannot, or the system is barely bootable.

It's the perfect size: big enough to be feature-rich and highly
usable, yet small enough that a single individual can
(theoretically) get his head around the entire code base. It's
also fun to hack.

I cannot guarantee 20hrs/week, but I would be very interested to
work through bug reports and small enhancement requests at my
own pace, and see what I can get done.

As a last thought for this email:

I suppose what we have here is a complete lack of consensus as to
the direction to take if we were to move into a 5.0 series.
My thinking is along the lines of complete modularity: a basic
interface design (that already exists) and everything else is
plugins. What if I want to use mc for inventory control? Make a
plugin to work with SQL instead of filesystem. Perhaps there
needs to be room for people to experiment with this sort of
thing. A 4.9beta branch that starts off as mess and arguments but
slowly gets sorted into something with vision.

That's my 2 cents worth.

Take care, and best wishes for those who are moving on to bigger
and better things. Thank you for your labors.



--
Peace and Cheer