Re: LYNX-DEV Lynx 3.0 (process)

[Andrew Kuchling]

        Geez, I leave for a week and miss an interesting thread like
this!  Anyway, I'm back from Montreal and San Francisco now, so...

Al Gilman (address@hidden) wrote:
> 1.  I want to second what Larry said that we need a Web Page
> somewhere that lists the topics in work, and rough expectations
> about the order of integration.  I might nominate Henry to keep

        OK; I have a list of suggestions for future Lynx development
at http://people.magnet.com/%7Eamk/lynx/ , taken from numerous people
on the list; I'm willing to maintain that page, and to sort the list
into a rough order of priority.

> 3.  As to what gets integrated next, I don't see a clear answer.
> If I had to guess it would be styles _a la_ RP or Configure.  But

        I'd consider merging to wwwlib5 as the highest priority.  It's
the biggest job on the list, I think, and will require major
restructuring of the Lynx code.  (For starters, can't we make all the
C code ANSI now, and forget about K&R C?)  Therefore, I think we
should do that first, rather than write lots of new code for 2.8 which
will then have to be reworked later.  In addition, the change to
wwwlib5 is so major that it should get as much testing as possible;
thus it should be included as soon as possible, so that further
hacking occurs using that code base.  We should also attempt to roll
the changes we make back into the official wwwlib5 distribution.

Hiram Lester, Jr. (address@hidden) wrote:
>I also think that something needs to be done so that cookies can be
>accepted from all domains by default.  I agree with Fote that it should
>probably not be a system-wide setting in the lynx.cfg, otherwise less
>scupulous sysadmins might set it so that the users were not aware of the
>security issues involved.  I, on the other hand, are not paranoid about

        Evil sysadmins aren't the problem; if your sysadmin is out to
get you, he can insert any code he likes into Lynx.  The problem was
simply one of neglect; if sysadmins just unzip Lynx, compile it, and
dump lynx.cfg into /usr/local/lib without even looking at the file,
users could be forced to accept all cookies whether they want to or
not.  Letting the user override the cookie setting in .lynxrc would
bring us much of the way there; so would allowing multiple lynx.cfg
files.

        Some people requested saving cookies to files.  That wouldn't
be very difficult to implement; just write them out when the user
quits, and read them in on startup, and enhance the cookie jar page to
allow marking cookies as "To Be Saved".  It's nowhere near the
complexity of the wwwlib5 change or style patches, so I'll
eventually do it, but it's not a high priority.


        Andrew Kuchling
        address@hidden
        http://people.magnet.com/%7Eamk/
Save the Gutenberg Project! http://www.promo.net/pg/nl/pgny_nov96.html




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