Why FAR Manager it's kinda' dead project ...

You want to talk about Far Manager, but don't know where to turn?

Does FAR have to be open-source?

Yes, i'll be happy to work on future development
23
45%
Yes, i'll use it with more pasion
18
35%
No
7
14%
I don't give a ****
3
6%
 
Total votes: 51

hujer
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reply

Post by hujer »

just a few words

opensource is not a cure for everything, but its still better than doing nothing, making the project opensource wont kill it, but keeping it closed and do nothing will...

i am using far for many years and many times i wished i had sources so i could some features, but i cant... if i could i would add for example drag-drop support out of far into windows applications, which i miss very much
Duke
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Re: reply

Post by Duke »

hujer wrote: if i could i would add for example drag-drop support out of far into windows applications, which i miss very much
I think it's not necessary. When u need drag'n'drop to any file, write "." (a dot) into the command line and press <Shift+Enter>. (I think this is a simply way, if u don't use often.)
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t-rex
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Post by t-rex »

There is a Drag'n'Drop plugin for Far available on the russian forum.
hujer
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thanks

Post by hujer »

thanks for the info, going to test the dragdrop plugin (used babelfish to find it in the russian forums)

duke : until now i was using "start ." but "." with shift-enter is nice too :)

btw: i cant understand why the russian devels make such a big deal about opensourcing the project, its not like it can do any damage in any way :(
pandronic
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Joined: Thu Aug 11, 2005 9:02 am

Re: thanks

Post by pandronic »

hujer wrote:thanks for the info, going to test the dragdrop plugin (used babelfish to find it in the russian forums)
Could you provide a direct link please?
pandronic
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Re: thanks

Post by pandronic »

I had to take a crashcourse in russian from babelfish to find this plugin, but I finally found it:

http://forum.farmanager.com/viewtopic.php?t=716

Thanks for the awesome support guys and I'll see you in a few years when Far makes it to beta again. :wink:
zykov
Posts: 1
Joined: Mon Dec 26, 2005 6:59 am

midnight commander

Post by zykov »

FAR is my favorite file manager for windows as well.
People wrote in this thread that they would like to see it open source.
There is similar open source project for unix. It is called "Midnight Commander" (http://www.ibiblio.org/mc/). So people are free to complement this file manager with native windows support. I personally would be glad to have the same file manager for both unix and windows.
intersol
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Post by intersol »

Interesant point of view. I think I can see what you want to tell but this is a scenario like "what-if-goes-wrong" and current scenario is "it-does-worse!".

There are OS licensing methods that could prevent this - and did i mention that this is happening ONLY when the project is NOT using a common OS license (OSI aproved) AND when the main development team is not working on the project anymore. Nobody will make a fork without good reasons !!!

The DN project is not failing because of this: i loved DN and I'installed the current win32 build but I could not work in Pascal/Turbovision (dislike it) anymore and I don't accept the license terms of Necromancer - it's not open source anymore so why to help them improve something they are going to chage me after a while.

Other problem of DN is the fact that there are too many features implemented in the main application - those MUST stay in plugins like FAR, mozilla,...
mark
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Joined: Tue Feb 21, 2006 3:33 pm

about open source

Post by mark »

Hi,
I thought I should also comment on Far vs Open Source.

While Open source does mean that everyone does have access to source code and could modify them if wanted to, in most active OSS projects the branching never happens (a few notable exceptions are perhaps Linux and emacs)

Examples of large projects which stay well within mainstream version include: firefox, python, gnome, cygwin, etc and numerous smaller projects... The reason for that is that once you establish your project website -- whoevre wants to get a new version goes to your website, and not to some obscure modified version of it. Of course one is welcome to play and modify local version of the project -- but it would almost never spread beyond local computer and if it does, only because the original project gods liked it and it goes directly into main stream...

As for the project management, there are a project administrators who decide what goes in or who gets commits privileges to CVS tree, and whatnot and this ensures that the project does not mutate arbitrarily... Also administrators decide on further development of the project and direct other contributors development.... Additionally -- if far goes open source, i think one might get non-trivial donation-ware support for it.

My primary interest in Far going open source is to get a linux version of it, which i guess is the largest thing missing in Far (and linux).

I think for now -- far could easily go open-source WITHOUT letting anyone a privilege to modify the mainstream version... I think in that case, the mainstream windows version WILL maintain its status quo indefinitely, but we will see ports to other operating systems...
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t-rex
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Post by t-rex »

Well, porting FAR to linux is not as simple as it sounds. It was written with only WinAPI in mind. It uses WinAPI extensivly so instead of porting it I think writing a new one will be better.
mark
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Post by mark »

t-rex wrote:Well, porting FAR to linux is not as simple as it sounds. It was written with only WinAPI in mind. It uses WinAPI extensivly so instead of porting it I think writing a new one will be better.
Well, it should still be fairly doable to make it work under Wine or Linspire... That would be good enough to.
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t-rex
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Post by t-rex »

mark wrote:
t-rex wrote:Well, porting FAR to linux is not as simple as it sounds. It was written with only WinAPI in mind. It uses WinAPI extensivly so instead of porting it I think writing a new one will be better.
Well, it should still be fairly doable to make it work under Wine or Linspire... That would be good enough to.
Well, that's something we might look into. FAR code can be compiled with gcc, maybe you know how to compile it under linux to get a win32 exe? So I can debug it under wine?
mark
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Post by mark »

t-rex wrote: Well, that's something we might look into. FAR code can be compiled with gcc, maybe you know how to compile it under linux to get a win32 exe? So I can debug it under wine?
What do you mean? You want to comile under linux to get native win32? I am sure
you could do that, but i am not sure why...

Actually sorry for misinforming, my information was a little outdated. I thought that at its current Far doesn't run under wine. With the latest version of wineconsole Far runs under wine without recompiling pretty nicely, but there are qutie a few glitches, (such as windows don't resize, sometimes fonts are screwed up, periodic warning messages on the screen, etc...), which make it less usable than it should be. It might be due to limitations of wineconsole, but it might be easily fixable in far too...

One could use winedbg to debug it, i don't know how useful that would be though.

Also if one wants to get somewhat more "native" application, one might recompile it under winelib, but according to wine website there isn't that much of a difference...
mark
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Far and Wine

Post by mark »

One more update, after playing and installing some extra fonts and switching to backend=user, so that it uses user32.dll, instead of using unix curses, Far seem to work flawlessly (except for resizing - which only works via wine menu). Colorer works just great, and so is FTP . .. Wow! :)

It still can not execute inux native programs, but hopefully
that could be fixed via either some extra scripts which would get outside of wine sandbox,
(if wine allows that), or by fixing far itself so that it becomes native linux application using winelib .. :roll:
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t-rex
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Post by t-rex »

Ok, I have Ubuntu linux and latest wine installed. I never used wine before so could you please tell how exactly do I run FAR under wineconsole? I might look into the linux native files execution - I think that I know why it might happen.
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