Opera & Midnight Commander

[Harijs Buss]

On Friday 31 March 2006 03:05, Michael M. rakstija:

> It's not a question of mc needing to be loaded with more features that
> it already has, or play music and tap dance while it moves your files.
> It's a question of it needing to work properly in the default environment.

I will allways choose useful, widespread, in fact classic "first aid" tool to 
be included in distro (0.6 Mb !) instead of absence of this tool because of 
higly hypotetic necessity to "work properly in the default environment". 

There are no "properly working" programs at all, at least not on this planet. 
All programs can (theoretically) be made "more proper". That shouldn't keep 
us from using them if generally they work OK. 

> It's the inattention to details like this that keeps more people from
> using Linux.  

Not in this specific case. Ubuntu is not the only one distro around, and MC is 
not simply "one more program".  Right now there are lot of "refugees" from 
another distribution, where company fired it's founder - author of that 
distro. These people are looking for another distro because of unclear 
perspectives, bad financial decisions and chaotic management. Ubuntu/Kubuntu 
certainly is one of first candidates to be the new choice for these people. 

However absence of such useful things as Midnight Commander etc. is kind of 
deterring factor.  It's an attitude thing.  It brings other things with that.

For example I found that official way to propose inclusion of MC in Ubuntu 
distro is so beaurocratic that IMHO it's simply not available for any 
ordinary user (take, for example, source code analysis which needs to be 
presented).  Moreover, I found that one of main templates you need to fill is 
given as broken link! ("Main Inclusion Report for sourcepackage").  OK, 
mistakes do happen. I reported this broken link to webmaster and politely 
asked for correct link. The response was:

> It is the nature of the wiki that links may be broken or information may
> not be completely accurate. The links on the main website however should 
> be correct. Your best bet for finding the information you are after may 
> be google. 

And this is attitude problem again. The link I mentioned is not simply some 
low-significance other link. It is link to "Main Inclusion Report for 
sourcepackage". You can not move forward without this document. Only it's not 
available and webmaster clearly does not intend to correct the link. If I 
would find something using Google, I will never know if it's really the 
official version of this document.

>   Especially if that distro wants to be seen as "polished."

While you will keep on "polishing", people might simply choose another distro. 
Not because of MC alone, certainly. But they may do so because of attitude.

Harijs