Re: LYNX-DEV Auto Configure

[Klaus Weide]

On Mon, 10 Mar 1997, Scott McGee (Personal) wrote:

> I looked at the code for Lynx, and I think a change can be made to add
> a development version string  (sort of a patch level) without effecting
> the user agent string by doing the following:
> 
> Add LYNX_DEV_VERSION right after LYNX_VERSION in userdefs.h and set it to
> "ac 1.0" and leave LYNX_VERSION as "2.7"
> [...]
> 
> Opinions?

I am not convinced that it is a good thing to have two kinds of version
strings.  They have to be kept in sync; and somebody is sooner or later 
going to change one of them while forgetting to change the other.

I also don't see the harm in sending something more detailed than
"Lynx/2.7 libwww-FM/2.14" to servers.  I cannot take the concern that this
would "split the Lynx vote" very seriously.  As long as it starts with
"Lynx/" it doesn't take a human or a script too much intelligence to
figure out that it means Lynx.  OTOH it may help debugging in some cases
to have more detailed information transmitted.  Other browsers put the
operating system or the screen resolution in the User-Agent header, and
server adminstrators (if they are interested in browser statistics) have
already had to learn to deal with that.


  Klaus



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