mc/README.PC

Midnight Commander for Win32 and OS/2
-------------------------------------

0. Introduction
1. Compiling
2. Changes made
3. Authors and maintainers

0. Introduction
---------------
Yes, Midnight Commander can be compiled for Win32 (Microsoft Windows 95, 98 and
NT) and OS/2. It has many bugs, but is quite stable now. Maybe you can help as
a beta tester or as a programmer. In either case you would like subscribe to
mc-devel list (see README files in main doc on how to do this) and contact us.
Please note, that Midnight Commander remains primarily a file manager for
UNIX-like systems, so recent changes may occasionally break something.
You should not expect that it will work on your system better than file
managers written specifically for your OS.

1. Compiling
------------

1.1. Compiler
-------------
If you really want to enjoy free software under your non-free OS, you should
try free compilers. Three of them are supported: EMX (OS/2), RSX and Mingw32
(Win32). RSX is based on EMX, and can also cross-compile for OS/2 under
Windows. Mingw32 is conceived as a free clone for Microsoft Visual C++.
Please note, that all above compiler are based on gcc (GNU C compiler), but
use different libraries.
Cygwin is not (yet) powerful enough to compile Windows-specific portion of
the Midnight Commander, but you may try to compile MC using UNIX configuration
files. As you can easily imagine, resulting binary will need termcap or
terminfo and use ANSI-sequences for output which is probably not what you want.
You may also try non-free compilers. Microsoft Visual C++ (4.0 and above),
Borland C++ (both for Win32 and OS/2) and IBM CSet are supported. "Supported"
means merely that there are specific makefiles for those compilers, but it
does not even assume that you will compile MC by them out-of-box.

1.2. General issues
-------------------
See pc/README, pc/BUGS, pc/TODO for the information concerning current state
of the port.
You may need to create some fake includes to compile. You may also need to
change something in the MC sources.

1.3 Windowing Library
---------------------
Currently only support for SLang windowing library is given. There are
curses clones ported to Win32 and OS/2, but I believe that since there is
no analogs for autoconf for those systems, we should avoid unnecessary
difficulties.
Currently the PC port SLang included in this distribution (see slang/
subdirectory). This is a subset of SLang 0.99.38 distribution with some
bugs fixed. There are also MC-specific changes in the code.
SLang 0.99.38 has problems with OS/2 if you like console with more than
80x25 characters. You may try to use a newer SLang. It is possible, but it
is also quite tricky.

1.4 Features and Limitations
----------------------------
Internal editor is supported (including syntax highlighting).
VFS (virtual file system) is not supported.
X11 ports are not supported.

2. Changes made
---------------

2.1. Changes to main code
-------------------------
Changes in the main code are enclosed in #ifdef _OS_NT, __os2__  or OS2_NT
blocks.

In some cases we suppressed code. This is temporal (so that mc can compile). In
the future we will provide fake or true interfaces for these features.
   - Links: creation and information on links are not supported. We
            should provide a fake interface for the local filesystem and
            a true one for networked.
   - GID/UID queries (get_user, owner, preserve UID/GID on copy, ...).
   - TERMinals: all the code directly done with terminals must be suppressed.
   - Signals: deleted. Should support the native ones.
   - pipes: had some trouble in ext.c and with error_pipes but soon will be
            fixed.
   - Chown command: Not supported yet.

2.2. Files rewritten
--------------------
There are several files with so many changes that they have been moved to pc/
subdirectory. Some of them are common for Win32 and OS/2, some of them are
system-specific. System-specific files bear a clear mark in their names
(for example, dirent_nt.c)
Our intention should be, however, to make most code system-independent. This
would increase code reuse and maintainability :-)
See pc/ subdirectory for further details.

3. Authors and maintainers
--------------------------
This port is based on the port for Windows NT by
    Juan Grigera <grigera@isis.unlp.edu.ar>
and the port for OS/2 by
    Alexander Dong <ado@software-ag.de>
Both ports were merged to one PC port by me,
    Pavel Roskin <proski@gnu.org>
Please note, that I'm using Linux now. I have access to Windows 95 machines,
but I have no access to OS/2 machines. If you are really keen to continue my
work, please drop me a letter.

Pavel Roskin <proski@gnu.org>