Re: [Lynx-dev] lynx.cfg setting preservation notification

[Thomas Dickey]

On Thu, May 13, 2004 at 10:04:13PM -0400, Stef Caunter wrote:
> lynx appends "saved settings" to /usr/local/lib/lynx.cfg, which is usually
> good.  I think this saving behaviour has been true for about a year or so; I
> haven't done an install since 2.8.5rel1 so I assume this is default
> behaviour; forgive the following if that is not so.
> 
> I was toggling (I thought) FORCE_SSL_COOKIES_SECURE in its default location
> in lynx.cfg to get ebay (yes it works rather well with lynx) to remember who
> I am after an SSL sign on.  I did not realize that I had saved settings down
> *at the end of the file* untoggling my new setting until:
> 
> a. the toggle seemed to not work and
> 
> b. I looked for any and all instances of FORCE_SSL in the file
>    and found the saved lines appended.
> 
> When such a preservation of a setting is done can some indication near the
> default location for the setting be inserted into lynx.cfg such as:
> 
> # the setting for SOME_SETTING was preserved from a lynx.cfg dated "date"
> 
> When you go months between looking at your cfg, but you upgrade more often,
> it might help to keep settings straight.
> 
> It might be an idea to locate the saved setting by the default location with
> a note about it, such as
> 
> # this is a setting from a lynx.cfg from "date"

If you do repeated installs, keeping the comments straight might be
some work: should the comments accumulate, or result in just one.
 
> Looking at install-cfg.sh, I could submit a change if it was thought useful. 
> (Presume shell is preferred for such an edit).  If it's not thought useful,
> I'll just use perl for my own hack.  Am I right that perl is avoided by the
> lynx install?
> There seems to be just the one cfg2html.pl script in scripts, and it doesn't 
> run in the install.

right - that's for an optional feature that isn't really very portable, in the
sense that I wouldn't want to try to make it work on non-Unix boxes, and would
be very difficult to implement in awk and sed.

I wouldn't want to require Perl for installing Lynx.  (The latter part of what
I understand you to be asking can be done in awk, for instance).  We could
make it a little more complicated by checking if Perl is found, and if so,
doing the fancier install.

-- 
Thomas E. Dickey <address@hidden>
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net

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