On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 04:35:34PM +0100, E Taylor wrote: > It's such an honour to have my "bug" report answered by the author > himself. I was actually thinking of emailing you about the program, but > I wasn't sure if that was the correct procedure. Hopefully you don't > mind me responding to your email directly like this.
I think it's an author's duty to follow and reply to bugs or queries. > Firstly thank you for creating such an amazing program, it really will > help me abandon the six-legged freak of "vi", and I will encourage > everyone who is new to Debian and Ubuntu to use this fantastic editor. I'm glad to know you find it useful. > Secondly, thank you for giving me this workaround for forcing the > interface. I had thought there must be a way to trick mped, but I > thought that it would require resetting the DISPLAY variable after you > exit mped. Is there any chance you could make the interface choice a > command line argument, though? mped -i curses or mped -i gtk The 3.x branch have an option like that, but I never reimplemented it on 5.x, just because overriding DISPLAY is enough and nobody cared. If you think it's really important, I will reconsider it. > so the NAME section should probably be something like: > mped - Minimum Profit EDitor, a text editor for programmers That's fine, I've changed that header line in the man page source. The inconsistency about the binary name in the man page is because 'mp-5' is the original name, but Debian renamed it (for historical reasons, I suppose) to mped. I added an option to config.sh to ease this transition. But sadly, the Debian package has always been in flux. I made some suggestions to the (then) maintainer, and though he is/was a fine person, it seems Debian packaging was not too high in his priorities' list. For example, I always wanted to have two binary packages, one ncursesw-only, and the other GTK+ncursesw, but my prayers were never heard. Now, the editor also has a KDE4 interface, but being things like they are (and remember, mped has *no* maintainer other than the QA Team), I never even bothered to suggest it. Just take a look at README.Debian; it's just *my* document about Debian and it says it's 'unofficial' (I don't know if that is fixed now, but didn't was last time I checked). Back to the man page binary name inconsistency, I think the proper thing is to add an inline sed oneliner to replace 'mp-5' with 'mped' inside mped.1 in the Debian package build or install scripts and everything would be fine. > Finally, do you think there is a problem with your build script that > makes it check for one package and then, if it finds it, it uses a > completely different package? I'm not sure to understand you fully here. The config.sh script just searches for ncursesw and uses ncursesw (no mention about plain ncurses, other than including curses.h), the problem was on Debian dependencies. Remember I have no control on that. > Thank you again for writing such a great text editor, and I hope you > don't mind this email. You're welcome. > P.S. How do you access the Easter Egg? There is no longer an easter egg, that was from the 3.x branch many years ago (this is another mark of the package's state of abandonment, the list of features is from 2004 or so. Take note that it does not mention important things as undo levels and Unicode support). The easter egg was there as a contest, and I always said it was meant to be there until someone found it. A user found it, and I deleted it from the code. If you are curious, it was the following: if you wrote (as an exact full string of keystrokes, no editing nor cursor moving) [Fear the Triceratops], a crappy, ASCII-art dinosaur was inserted into the text. Regards, -- Angel Ortega
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