LYNX-DEV USE_ZLIB (was Re: DOS suggestions)

[Klaus Weide]

On Sun, 28 Sep 1997, Doug Kaufman wrote:

> I have added USE_ZLIB to the makefile for DOS. Is there a drawback to
> using ZLIB?

I haven't answered this before, so:

The main advantage is that in some situations extra disk copies are
avoided.  As an extreme case, one can now view a gzipped HTML or plain
text file from local disk even without any free space in the temp
directory - whereas before, there had to be enough space for a copy of the
original gzipped file AND and its uncompressed version.  Also, loading of
a large gzipped (local) file can now be 'z'apped and the contents up to
that point will be shown.  So it's most useful for working with very big
files and/or tight disk space situations.  For gzipped files from the net
(anything else than "file:" URLs) the advantages are only partial, since
still first a local file copy is made.

One theoritical drawback might be an increase in required memory for
zlib's buffering, details should be in the zlib docs.  But since you
haven't observed any problem with this, let's assume it's just
theoretical. :)

In general, the things happening to a compressed file can get quite
complicated, especially when considering all the possible combination of
(1) origin (file:, http:, ftp:) and MIME type, (2) destination (VIEWER,
internal, download), (3) encoding type (gzip or compress), (4) SUFFIX
rules, (5) whether it has been retrieved before and the temp file name is
cached,...  Here are some of my notes from trying to understand some of 
it, to give an idea:
     <URL:http://sol.slcc.edu/lynx/klaus/texts/HTFWNotes.html>.
I certainly haven't looked at all possible combinations, and the recnt
changes may well have some undesired effect although I hope not.
IOW they need testing.

  Klasu


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