Hi all, I was very happy to see renewed interest and development in mc, probably one of the programs I use most often.
I've seen Patrick Winnertz mention this on his blog, and was wondering about the reasoning behind it: * Added a micro helper library in order to go slowly avay from glib I thought this was a bit surprising - from what I understand from the mailing list archives, the reasons for this are: a) memory requirements -> as you probably know glib is being used for a lot of projects, to the point that it's hard to avoid at all, even on embedded; on platforms with really constrained memory (easy to OOM) glib is probably not ideal, but to be honest, I can't imagine running mc on those either; b) performance -> Enrico Weigelt mentioned some ways in which glib is underperforming or adding unnecessary abstractions. I'd argue that if it's just the implementation, it should be fixed in glib itself; I also wonder what kind of performance gains we're talking about here, whether they're worth it. c) possible interface breaks -> I think every library has those, but I also think glib has been better than most in maintaining the compatibility since their last major API break 7 years ago. Considering the number of projects using it, they're more than careful not to do anything crazy. Things get added and deprecated, obviously (like the g_strcasecmp() Enrico mentioned, deprecated since 2.2 six years ago); but that's a good thing, I think. Now, don't get me wrong: if glib gets in the way of your esthetic senses, or you dislike it for some other reasons, feel free to toss it; I'm already grateful people are taking an interest in mc at all. But I'd expected you to start using more of glib, instead of less. Because it's well tested and in wide use, and because you can take advantage of features that glib implements so you don't have to implement or maintain these; stuff like GIO/GVFS, win32 portability, etc. Either way, thanks for picking the Midnight Commander up - I look forward to the new releases. Mourad _______________________________________________ Mc-devel mailing list http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc-devel