lynx-dev thoughts on cookie file w/multiple sessions

[brian j. pardy]

Some method to handle a single cookie file being used by multiple Lynx
sessions needs to be worked out.

This is an idea I recently came up with, but it seems too simple to me and
I need someone to poke holes in it. 

As things are presently:

    Two sessions, A and B are running. Both load the same set of cookies
    from COOKIE_FILE.

    Session A gets a new cookie from some site, then exits, writing all
    the original cookies and the new cookie to COOKIE_FILE.

    Session B quits, overwriting COOKIE_FILE with all the original
    cookies, but blowing away the new cookie that session A received.

So here's my thought -- prior to writing cookies in memory to COOKIE_FILE,
Lynx should *reread* COOKIE_FILE, ignoring any cookies that are already in
memory, but adding cookies from the file that are not in memory. 

The only thing coming to mind so far that could be a problem here would be
getting two cookies with the same 'name' attribute from a server in two
different sessions (two unique identifiers from advertising sites?), in
which case the one which is written to COOKIE_FILE first (thus read into
memory in the other Lynx session, overwriting the existing one) will be
maintained, and the others dropped. 

Netscape, FWIW, gives an error saying basically "I'm already running,
bookmarks won't work properly" to get around the issue of multiple
instances, I assume this means cookies won't work either.

-- 
I just asked myself... what would John DeLorean do?
                -- Raoul Duke