Recently Pavel Machek contacted me and mentioned that Pavel might be
interested in becoming the maintainer for MC. Which I felt was like a
good idea, given that I was looking for a maintainer for the program.
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.
Nautilus is indeed going to be the next generation file manager for
GNOME, but in its current state it is too big and too slow for users
that are not running top of the line computer systems. I recently
visited Spain and the "big" machines that were being used by most
people were the 200 Pentium MMX computers with 32 to 64 megs of
memory. Sure, high end computers are available to be purchsaed, but
many developers are still using 33 Mhz computers in there. And Spain
is part of the European Union.
Things are worse in other countries. The GNOME edition of MC as a
file manager is not ideal and is far from perfect, but currently there
is no solution for those small machines that want to run a graphical
user interface. I know the GNOME adapter layer is one of the most
disgusting pieces of code out there, but if I want to keep it is not
because of a personal preference (for the record: I am mostly a
gnome-terminal + mc kind of user, and use gmc mostly just to keep my
desktop icons) but because there is still a need for it.
This is GPL software, and of course you can fork the code base, and of
course you can maintain your own, but instead I ask you to work with
me. If you decide to fork, you will just increase the ammount of work
that I will have to do, as I will merge the changes that you do in
your forked copy of MC into the main version of MC.
I do not expect this to go on forever, rather I would expect to
either Nautilus to become smaller and faster, or another small file
manager for GNOME to appear for users that are running on systems with
a limited set of resources.
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.
Miguel.
