Please Continue Support Of pcmanfm-legacy

[DasFox]

PCMan can you please, in your spare time continue the support of pcmanfm-legacy?

This is still a very nice application for those that want something simpler and lighter without all the gvfs dependency.

As an example, I am an experienced Linux user of 10 years and I run Slackware 13.1 with only OpenBox and I had been working on pcmanfm 0.9x for one week trying to get it to automount and I could never figure out the problem and yes I followed the PCManFM Wiki for building and did everything. http://wiki.lxde.org/en/PCManFM_build_and_setup_guide

In frustration after a week I gave up and installed 0.5.2, as soon as I started it, it automounted my usb storage drive and I couldn't of been happier.

I ran it all day yesterday putting different GTK+ themes and OpenBox themes on it and I never saw it fail once or show any error messages while running, it ran perfectly.

Sure, there are many people that will enjoy having the 0.9.x versions for what it offers but there are also other people I have seen in the Linux community across the world that enjoy using the pcmanfm-legacy version for it's simplicity and less dependencies.

There is nothing wrong with the pcmanfm-legacy, except, from what I can see no trash can, which I could personally care less about, because if I need to delete things I can always do it from the CLI, 'rm -rf' 'rm'.

I'm asking, PCMan, PLEASE in your spare time, PLEASE continue supporting pcmanfm-legacy, it's a great program, PLEASE don't let it die, because I thought the goal of this program was to give to the Linux community a nice, simple light weight file manager and the legacy version is just that and the 0.9.x version is not quite as light weight.

Granted this is not the Nautilus file manager, but when I run programs I like them as light as possible, with as little dependencies as possible and I don't care for Gnome dependencies, or KDE dependencies either.

Thank you for your consideration, I hope you'll continue with this!

[IgnorantGuru]

I agree that 0.5.2 is a nice little app. While I haven't ruled out upgrading to 0.9 at some point, I have been maintaining a fork of 0.5.2 which you may be interested in. It makes minimal and well-documented changes to insert a few features, and also corrects some bugs, one of them serious (potential data loss - see below). Also, GTK 2.20 rendered 0.5.2 unusable in detailed mode with double-clicks, and after months they're still not fixing it. Most programs affected like Thunar and PCManFM 0.9 have used workarounds to the problem. pcmanfm-mod includes a workaround for this. If you haven't encountered this problem in Slackware yet, you probably will. I mainly wrote this mod for my own use, but I shared it and received some good feedback and suggestions, and it seems to have a few hundred users now. So you're not alone in liking the legacy version.

You can read the details of pcmanfm-mod and download from here...
http://igurublog.wordpress.com/downloads/mod-pcmanfm/

Among other corrections to problems with link-handling, the latest version of the mod fixes the following bug. Even if you don't use the mod, you should make yourself aware of the issue in 0.5.2.

A serious bug which caused pcmanfm to overwrite link targets has been corrected. When copying a file onto an existing link, and opting to overwrite it, pcmanfm would in some cases overwrite the target of the link instead of replacing the link. In other cases a file with a mangled filename would be created in the target’s directory. Both these problems are now corrected. Note that this bug can cause data loss so if you’re not using mod 1.0.1, be sure to delete links before replacing them – don’t attempt to overwrite them.

[maces]

Hi,

I think PCManFM-legacy is a very nice application, and work very well. IgnorantGuru's mod brings nice features.

But as PCMAN said, the code is now very complicated, because at the time it was created, it was designed only for his needs. With the new PCManFM maintaining the code should much more easy.

You can also see that you are able, to disable gvfs. When you are trying to get gvfs working, have a look at this, it helped me a lot.

maces

[DasFox]

I agree that 0.5.2 is a nice little app. While I haven't ruled out upgrading to 0.9 at some point, I have been maintaining a fork of 0.5.2 which you may be interested in. It makes minimal and well-documented changes to insert a few features, and also corrects some bugs, one of them serious (potential data loss - see below). Also, GTK 2.2.0 rendered 0.5.2 unusable in detailed mode with double-clicks, and after months they're still not fixing it. Most programs affected like Thunar and PCManFM 0.9 have used workarounds to the problem. pcmanfm-mod includes a workaround for this. If you haven't encountered this problem in Slackware yet, you probably will. I mainly wrote this mod for my own use, but I shared it and received some good feedback and suggestions, and it seems to have a few hundred users now. So you're not alone in liking the legacy version.

You can read the details of pcmanfm-mod and download from here...
http://igurublog.wordpress.com/downloads/mod-pcmanfm/

Among other corrections to problems with link-handling, the latest version of the mod fixes the following bug. Even if you don't use the mod, you should make yourself aware of the issue in 0.5.2.

A serious bug which caused pcmanfm to overwrite link targets has been corrected. When copying a file onto an existing link, and opting to overwrite it, pcmanfm would in some cases overwrite the target of the link instead of replacing the link. In other cases a file with a mangled filename would be created in the target’s directory. Both these problems are now corrected. Note that this bug can cause data loss so if you’re not using mod 1.0.1, be sure to delete links before replacing them – don’t attempt to overwrite them.

Why do you call this a mod? You mean to equal modified or module?

In computing typically a mod is a module add on, something that exists outside the original that is added to this, yet when I visit your site you say 'modified'.

If it is a modified version then that's just calling it modded, a mod in computing is always a module, big difference...

Anyhow nice to see someone doing something here with this.

By the way Slackware 13.1 uses gtk+2.2.18....

One thing I have noticed in 0.5.2. is sometimes a device will show up two times on the left hand window and someone told me they had this same experience.

It would be nice if you could fix this...

Hi,

I think PCManFM-legacy is a very nice application, and work very well. IgnorantGuru's mod brings nice features.

But as PCMAN said, the code is now very complicated, because at the time it was created, it was designed only for his needs. With the new PCManFM maintaining the code should much more easy.

You can also see that you are able, to disable gvfs. When you are trying to get gvfs working, have a look at this, it helped me a lot.

maces

No gvfs No automounting...

[maces]

1. Well I think it is called a "mod", because it's pretty original PCManFm with only some modifications. But you're right, it would be called a fork normally.

2. Well, your choice. Fell free to maintain the pcmanfm-legacy, but our dev's haven't the time to do so, AFAIK.

maces

[IgnorantGuru]

Re the name "mod"... maces has the right idea... "modified". Originally it was a very limited source modification to 0.5.2, a modded (patched) version. Since then it has grown into more of an outright fork, but I figure it would cause more confusion than good to rename it. Also, it is still basically 0.5.2 - the changes are relatively minor and limited - each well documented in the README and in the source. I don't know how standardized any of this terminology is. Websters lists "mod" as an abbreviation for "modification; modified". So there. It's not a module, at any rate.

One thing I have noticed in 0.5.2. is sometimes a device will show up two times on the left hand window and someone told me they had this same experience.

I will take a look at that next time I work on it - thanks. I don't normally use the device pane so wouldn't have noticed. If there is anything in particular that triggers the problem that would be helpful to know.

[IgnorantGuru]

By the way Slackware 13.1 uses gtk+2.2.18....

I don't think the bug was introduced until at least 2.19. Arch is currently at 2.20.1 and the bug still affects pcmanfm 0.5.2. But I think a workaround or fix was introduced in exo, which seemed to correct it for Thunar, so that may be affecting the situation too. At any rate, it seemed to affect Ubuntu, Crunchbang, and other distros as well. You have to be in detailed list view mode and be using double-click selection to encounter it.

Once Slackware reaches GTK 2.20 you can either use pcmanfm-mod to avoid it, or patch 0.5.2 using the patch here.

[PCMan]

PCMan can you please, in your spare time continue the support of pcmanfm-legacy?
Thank you for your consideration, I hope you'll continue with this!

Clearly the answer is no. I worked for more than 15 hours everyday and six days per week without holidays. Sometimes I need to work for 24 hours a day. Yes, this is true and working overtime won't be paid. So, I don't have spare time for this.
If the new version won't work well, my goal is to make it work better then, not to drop it and use the old one. The problem of HAL is, it's already dropped by its developer. It's still working because distros keeps it for compatibility reason. It'll be removed from LInux later. Several major distros, such as Fedora has already removed HAL. Even if you get it installed, it won't be supported by major distros and its developers in the future and you need to fix the bugs yourself. Unless you're going to takeover the work and maintain it. Otherwise, it's a better idea to migrate to new standards.

[IgnorantGuru]

One thing I have noticed in 0.5.2. is sometimes a device will show up two times on the left hand window and someone told me they had this same experience.

I took a look at this while working on the updated version but was not able to reproduce that behavior. Without that it's difficult to fix because there is a lot of code pertaining to volumes. If you can give me a detailed way to make it happen I'll take another look. I did see a debian bug report on this. It may also be a HAL configuration issue. The code that adds volumes didn't appear to check for a duplicate before adding a volume, but I'm not sure if it should - it seems to depend on HAL to tell it when to add or remove a volume.

[DasFox]

PCMan can you please, in your spare time continue the support of pcmanfm-legacy?
Thank you for your consideration, I hope you'll continue with this!

Clearly the answer is no. I worked for more than 15 hours everyday and six days per week without holidays. Sometimes I need to work for 24 hours a day. Yes, this is true and working overtime won't be paid. So, I don't have spare time for this.
If the new version won't work well, my goal is to make it work better then, not to drop it and use the old one. The problem of HAL is, it's already dropped by its developer. It's still working because distros keeps it for compatibility reason. It'll be removed from LInux later. Several major distros, such as Fedora has already removed HAL. Even if you get it installed, it won't be supported by major distros and its developers in the future and you need to fix the bugs yourself. Unless you're going to takeover the work and maintain it. Otherwise, it's a better idea to migrate to new standards.

Ok well I hope you can make something simple that works without gvfs and a bunch of gnome deps needed....

THANKS