Re: lynx-dev about lynx

[Klaus Weide]

On Mon, 31 Jul 2000, Barry Wu wrote:

> Hi, sir,
> 
> I am going to port lynx2-8-2 to ATI nucleus+ embedded OS.
> Now the problem is my system always crash down. I want to
> make the lynx as possible as small. But I do not know the
> architecture of lynx, and I can not find any docs about
> lynx architecture. Does anybody know and interested our
> project? If possible, please help me. And we are very
> glad to invite you to our project. 
> 
> Thanks in advance!

There aren't really any docs about the lynx architecture, aside
from comments in the source code.  Well that, and some documentation
on Libwww which you can find on the W3C Web site <http://www.w3.org>
still partially applies, to some lower-level functions.

I know nothing about your OS.  Maybe you should tell us something
about it.  The more UNIX-like it is, the easier it should be to port
lynx.

What kind of infrastructure for program development do you have?
Have GNU tools been ported to the platform?  Do you have a curses
or slang library (you'll need one)?

How much of the lynx functionality do you need?  What could you do
without?  Just how small does the resulting lynx have to be?

Do you even have a file system?  What does it look like (to an
application, and to a user)?

I would start with configuring on compiling lynx on a reference platform
(like Linux) with as many features as possible disabled (./configure
--without-... --disable-... ).  Then test whether it's still usable.
Then start stripping out more code, anything that relates to features
of the OS that are not available on your target OS.  (If that includes
file system - it'll be some work, and much functionality will be missing
[including HISTORY list, INFO page, ...], but the core functionality of
making network connections and rendering documents should stil be there.)

 
  Klaus


; To UNSUBSCRIBE: Send "unsubscribe lynx-dev" to address@hidden