Re: LYNX-DEV Historical question about libwww used in Lynx.

[Hiram Lester, Jr.]

On Wed, 4 Dec 1996, Klaus Weide wrote:

> Can't answer your historical question, but..
> 
> > having changes made by Lou Montoulli for Lynx... So, is the version in
> > Lynx actually 2.15 or 2.14 with mods?  
> 
> What's the difference?  :)
> 
> Lynx 2.6 is basically (the final stage of) Lynx 2.5-FM renamed...  etc. 

Yeah, I'm just trying to figure out what version the libwww-FM is based
on.  It appears to say 2.14, but I'm wondering since some of the lynx
stuff was incorporated in libwww/2.15 if libwww/2.15 was reincorporated
back into Lynx or at least some equivalent changes.  I know that it's too
late now, but it would seem that one should stay somewhat on top of
changes in libwww and keep the latest versions of clients at least
SOMEWHAT in sync with the lib.  We're now seeing the horror of trying to
go from a 2.x with heavy mods version to a 5.x version which is almost
entirely different... :(

> >                                        I'm just curious because, like
> > Klaus, I have done some investigation about the possibility of
> > incorporating at least portions of the newer wwwlib (probably not as much
> > work as Klaus though. :) ).  
> 
> Let me know if you want to have a look at what I have done. 
> It works, somewhat, on Linux.  Or maybe you want a Linux binary that
> does HTTP 1.1 (persistent connections, chunked transfer-encoding) but
> doesn't currently do POST or Authorization...  It also features messed-up
> URL parsing and a working persistent disk cache (but no switch to turn it
> off...).

Not right now... :)  No time with finals coming up... :)

> >                              I did try to make it on HP-UX, and it wil
> > definitely require gnu make. :(  That might be something that would have
> > to be taken out... 
> 
> For what does it require GNU make?  Maybe just for the ./configure thing,
> but not necessarily for interpreting the finally generated Makefile?

Nope, the configure thing runs fine, but the makefile uses gnu make
specific stuff (not sure what), and gave me a makefile error from make...
:(

> If that's the case, a hypothetical Lynx-with-libwww5 could distribute
> some frozen Makefiles for some configurations where ./configure cannot be
> used (like Lynx uses frozen Makefiles today).

If we wanted the most broadly available package, we'd have to use frozen
makefiles for at least those targets that don't have gnu make.  The only
ones that could be assumed to have gnu make would be things line linux and
the *BSD's... :/

   +------------------------------------+-------------------------------+
   | Hiram W. Lester, Jr.               | E-Mail: address@hidden    |
   | Computer Science                   | Home page:                    |
   | Middle Tennessee State University  |   http://pobox.com/~hwlester/ |
   +------------------------------------+-------------------------------+

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