lynx-dev getting into lynx code

[Klaus Weide]

On Fri, 15 Mar 2002, Martin McCormick wrote:

>       I must add, here, that I am very impressed with the
> commenting that has been done by the previous authors.  When I
> figure out what I am going to do, I must continue the tradition.

Yes, the commenting of many details is good; but it's more difficult
to get the whole picture.

In order to understand a lot of the stuff under WWW/..., I believe
it's still useful to refer to the Libwww documentation.  Not for
the details, but for concepts and overall structure.

Libwww has become a very different package from what is included
(greatly modified) in the lynx code - most of the descriptions don't
apply to lynx, caveat lector - but I believe the descriptions of
esp. HTAnchor and HTStream objects are still useful.  Also perhaps
HTStreamStack mechanism.  HTProtocol OTOH is quite different.

You'll find various overview documents about Libwww starting
from <http://www.w3.org/Library/> (then follow "Documentation" link).

>       I am running lynx under gdb and setting breakpoints at
> various places to observe how the whole process works.
> 
>       Usually, when I have written C programs, I must do this
> process many times even on my own code.  I would be lost without
> gdb.

That was also my experience, it took lots of gdb'ing to get an idea of
what-calls-what in Lynx.  It's not so easy to see in the source how
(e.g.) HTML_* functions get called and where they get their input from
- because those calls are made through struct members that are
function pointers.  That's part of how the libwww code implements
object-oriented concepts in C (and the docs referred above should
help understand it).

 Klaus


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