Hello, The MC subshell while being a nice feature has been the source of many problems as well. I've been following this list and the MC development for a while and I can tell that the problems caused by the subshell are the hardest to track down and eliminate. Trough the years many fixes were applied and it still remains unreliable and its behaviour is somewhat undefined.
This post is inspired by a recent discussion I had with Pavel Shirshov regarding a subshell misbehaviour on FreeBSD. While tracing the problem and trying to find a solution I realized several things: * the subshell behaviour is not clearly defined for that specific case thus fixing the problem would most likely case more undefined behaviour * there is no good way to solve the problem I also realized that the shell is too complicated and it tries to do more things that it really should do. Well, I was aware of this already but I kind of hoped that it just won't hit us. So, I think that instead of spending time in continuosly fixing the subshell we should spent some time in simplifying it and making it rock-solid. There are several features which are consistent source of problems: * the subshell prompt retrieval - this one is widely known to be unreliable. * execution of commands typed at MC's prompt widget trough the subshell My opinion is that we should remove both features from the subshell. Without those features the subshell shall have a single simple task. Interactive command execution when the panels are off. The current directory retrieval remains but it has not been a major source of problems though improvements won't harm. Especially if the directory retrieval could be made independent of the shell type. Please, feel free to share your opinion on this matter. I hope that at the end of this discussion we would have a better subshell. Thanks! _______________________________________________ Mc-devel mailing list http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc-devel