Hi. It has slowly dawned on me that, since I installed Debian almost 2
months ago, gnome midnight commander has never worked properly.
When I installed I copied my home dir over from my previous red hat
system. In my profile I experience only a couple of the symptoms of the
problems with gmc:
- can't change icons on desktop
- URL links don't work
These symptons are not so bad and I have learned to live with them. The
major problem is when I create a new user, the profile is almost
unusable under gnome because gmc doesn't work at all. From the reading I
have done it seems this is from bug #77172 "gmc fails to create its
metadata.db". All of these problems outlined above are already
registered as Important Outstanding Bugs against the gmc package and
most of them are almost 50 days old! Also from what I have read it
sounds like these problems are fixed when you build the package yourself
(something I'm not interested in wasting my time on).
My question is basically, what's going on with the gmc package? I
realize that you are susceptible to these kinds of things when running
the unstable distro, but these bugs are very important and are getting
very old. If I had just freshly installed and not copied my home dir
from my old system and had never been able to run gmc properly, well you
wouldn't be reading this now because I would have taken my chances with
RH7 instead! This is assuming we all want everybody to use Debian, so
don't tell me to go use Red Hat if I'm not happy with Debian. I am just
wondering if anybody has a fix (besides building the package yourself)
and what new users who are doing fresh installs right now are doing? If
there isn't a fix besides building your own then my guess is new users
are either switching to KDE or switching to another distro, two outcomes
that I'm sure alot of people feel to be undesirable.
Also, please don't reply saying that I should be running the stable
distro if I want it to be stable. I am willing to take a little
instability for the privelege of using the newer packages, but unstable
is different from unusable and for the last 6 weeks any new users that I
add to my system inherit a virtually unusable gnome desktop. Please let
me know if you have any information on this topic. Thanks. -Jeff
