LYNX-DEV Re: downloading patches from slcc

[Klaus Weide]

My long response (which got delayed) to Henry's mail was written before he 
wrote what is quoted below.  If he had made clear earlier that he cannot
use the patch-o-matic page, because he isn't really "on" the Internet, I
would have responded differently.

> Nelson Henry Eric wrote:
> 
> > > > -rw-------  1 user     8728 Aug 29 20:51 lynx2.7.1--2.7.1ac-0.57.diff.gz
> > > >                        ^^^^
> > > depends on how often you update (that's since April).
> > 
> > No.  It depends on how slow a person's connection is.  You've missed
> > the point.  I was only able to get 8728 bytes before the connection
> > gave out, i.e., Lynx printed the download option screen.  Usually I
> > can get 30,000-40,000 at that time of day.  Anyway in plain English,
> > no jabs no jive, at 4-5 in the morning with ftp I might be able to
> > pull down a full distribution.  I've just sort of gotten tired doing
> > that.  I say no more on this topic.  Bye.

You are basically offline and don't have a usable Internet connection,
at least as far as international traffic is concerned.  So use offline
tools (like mail).

On Sat, 30 Aug 1997, Bela Lubkin wrote:

> Henry, how reliable is *email* to your account?
> 
> What if you could send email to an automated account at slcc, and
> receive in return an autopatch diff?  i.e. something like:
> 
>   $ mail address@hidden
>   diff 2.7.1ac-0.23 current
>   ^D
> 
> It shouldn't be difficult to set up such a responder; the hard parts of
> the task are already being done by the WWW version of autopatch.  This
> would just be a different path in.
> 
> Then it would uu- or mime-encode the archive and mail it back to you.
> In your case, it might be true that such a large transaction would only
> work at 4am -- but SMTP will hide those details.  The results will show
> up in your mailbox whenever the wind is good.
> 
> Would the autopatch folks consider setting something like this up?  I
> would also find it useful -- it's much easier on my slow/flaky/expensive
> PPP link if I can get email rather than interactively provoking (and
> supervising) a download.

This already works with existing web-to-mail gateways.  The only free
one still (or again) in operation I could find is Peter Flynn's, see
<URL: http://www.ucc.ie/webmail/webmail.html>.  There may be others.
If lots of users in Japan share Henry's problem, there *should be*
one in Japan.  (And accessible caches, of course.)

The patches returned from the patch-o-matic page have individual URLs,
since the FORM is using the GET method.  An URL of the folowing form
works, if you just want the defaults: <URL: 
http://sol.slcc.edu/cgi-bin/lynx/patch?old_level=2.7.1ac-0.57&new_level=2.7.1ac-0.58>.
To get a gzipped patch, use <URL: http://sol.slcc.edu/cgi-bin/lynx/patch?
old_level=2.7.1ac-0.57&new_level=2.7.1ac-0.58&compressed=y> instead.

It works through the ucc.ie gateway, I just tested it for compressed
data.  The response comes back uuencoded.
 - Use GET, not SEND.
 - Note that there is a size limit, and other restrictions.
 - Don't use this service if you have a spam filter which blocks mail
   which doesn't have your address in To: or CC:.  You'll filter the
   response.
 - Quoted from <URL:http://www.ucc.ie/webmail/>: "Please do not
   use this service if you already have online access to the Web".

> [Extra bonus: can you make it also provide fotemods diffs -- e.g. "diff
> 2.7.1-fotemods-970601 2.7.1-fotemods-current"?  -- just asking, just in
> case...]

Now and then, but not everytime there is a change, Fote's code is checked
into the system.  The "version" string used is in the form 2.7.1fm-0.nn,
but that's for internal use only.  There is no way to correlate these with
970601 dates, other than through what

  List From patch level comments only: (*) Yes

would return.  You could use them (as described above) through a 
web-to-mail gateway if you have to.

Since Fote provides a breakout of the individual files for FTP access,
why not use FTP mirroring software which downloads only the files which
have changed.

Wget (according to its info page) can do this for FTP and also for HTTP,
so it should also work for the devel code breakout under
<URL:http://sol.slcc.edu/lynx/current/lynx2-7-1/>. Do things from cron
jobs at a time when connections are not as bad.

So there's lots of things that could be done without even involving any
changes at sol.slcc.edu.

   Klaus

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