Hi, Miguel!
> I was still considering this when I got a mail from Pavel regarding
> his intentions to drop the GNOME support on MC, and this made me
> change my mind. Let me explain why.
You are confusing "arguments" with "intentions" and "dropping" with
"forking".
My point is that the development of the textmode edition needs to move at
a different speed and have a separate release schedule. There is more than
one way to accomplish this goal.
I would never drop any significant piece of code unless I have a proof
that not a single person in the world will be let down. For example, if a
feature is broken and nobody sends a patch is a reasonable amount of time,
I can assume that either nobody uses it or whoever uses it uses a modified
version and will not be interested in upgrading it.
This absolutely doesn't apply to the GNOME frontend. It's used everywhere!
But my assumption was that nobody is going to develop the GNOME frontend
except applying minor fixes.
I have always been careful not to harm the GNOME frontend by any changes I
made. In fact, the only reason I have GNOME installed on all my computers
is to be able to test GMC.
My "intention" to drop the GNOME frontend was spoken out in the assumption
that its sources are still maintained, just in a different place and by
different people.
My suggestion to move the development to a different site was motivated
by my reluctance to use the resources of gnome.org by the project
unrelated to GNOME.
Another reason was to make the developers of the text edition more
responsible for what they are doing.
Say, sometimes I make a patch but don't change the documentation. I hope
that the maintainer will find better words to describe the changes. It's
Ok as long as I don't maintain the software.
But if I do maintain the software, I cannot do that. There is nobody who
will do it for me. I can experiment, add that code on CVS, ask people to
test it, but by the time of the release everything must be in a good
shape.
Now, the time of the release is an unknown factor in the case of the
Midnight Commander. Version 4.5.52 was released without informing the
developers' list. How can I expect any kind of responsibility from the
people who are not informed when the "Big Brother" is going to cut a new
release?
> So I am not going to appoint Pavel Roskin as mc maintainer if his
> plans are not inline with mine. As I said, you are free to fork, but
> I encourage you not to do this, but to work with me to improve mc.
You can appoint me with certain conditions, if you want. But please don't
descent to the level of directory structure.
For example, you can require that both editions are maintained, both can
be checked out from CVS in a relatively good shape and both are released
from time to time and time, just not necessarily simultaneously.
--
Regards,
Pavel Roskin
