Re: LYNX-DEV 2.7.1ac-0.84

[Nelson Henry Eric]

> I have made *some* of the changes proposed by Henry.  As a result, diffs

Not the ones that concern me the most.  I can't expect anyone to make
semi-radical changes unless I show enough conviction that the changes
would be worthwhile, thus once again I'll give my rationalization.  This
is long, so those not interested `d'-out now.

I believe "INSTALLATION" is hopelessly out of date.  If left in place,
it forces people to jump back and forth from the README.* files by Tom
and Wayne.  It's practically an insult now to Tom.  There is a lot of
wordiness and redundancy.  (Take for example the part on anonymous accounts:
13 lines repeated word-for-word, only 6 lines apart!)

The proposal I made, "http://163.51.110.11/lynxdev/INSTALLATION.gz";,
handles all of the ports in one document by dividing it into configuration,
compiling, installation and environment variable sections.  The importance
of configuring properly for your system is made quite clear, and redundancy
is avoided.  There are a number of trouble spots covered that have recently
come across the list (what's ncurses/slang? be careful users of strange
charsets! trying to --disable-char-trans is meaningless! And lots more).  The
compiling sections were written by Tom, Doug, Bill and Wayne, and I believe
are vastly superior to the original README.* files.  Only the VMS section
remains unchanged.  I even incorporated a segment of Wayne's "readme.txt"
that comes with the lynx_w32 zip so that at least there would be a hint of
how to set environment variables for DOS and Win32.  If nothing else, it
is up to date.

The proposals made in "http://163.51.110.11/lynxdev/USERDEFS.gz"; are three-
fold: touch up the lss_file stuff, move the define for LYMessages_en.h into
Section 2, and most importantly, consolidate the anonymous defines into one,
delineated section.  The editing with lss_file is no big deal, except that
I hope lines 208-209 will be corrected (ac-0.84).  I believe translating
and customizing of the messages should be encouraged, and not stuffed away.
Most important to me is the consolidating and making less wordy and redundant
the section on anonymous accounts.  The reason for me is that I hope to
eventually write a "So you want to set up a public access Lynx" document, and
it will help to have both INSTALLATION and userdefs.h concise enough that
someone can see the "whole picture".  As it is now "#define ANONYMOUS_USER"
is separated from the rest of the defines relating to it's use by more than
50 lines.  The proposed new section is clearly marked, beginning and end,
so that people building for their personal use only don't have to be troubled
by the loud warnings (for the longest time I went through and religiously
defined all that stuff because I wasn't sure just what "anonymous" meant).
As it is now, to get to the defines for the locations of certain files, you
first have to plow through (or at least jump over, which a first-timer
wouldn't know to do) all of it.  (There is one (1) verbal Canadian fan in
favor of this idea.)

Finally there is "http://163.51.110.11/lynxdev/SIMPLEDIR.gz";, the most
controversial.  I can live with what you implemented, and mostly need to
know if you will bend or not on the "about_lynx" idea, so that I can correct
the INSTALLATION proposal if necessary.  I don't agree that it is more
trouble than it is worth; in fact I went to the "trouble" of making up
patches to implement that directory's removal.  The two benefits I see
from it's removal is that it is an under-used directory, and only the four
files presently (ac-0.84) in there do not warrant it's existence.  In the
long run, I also think it will make it more straight forward to install
the help files locally if they don't have to be installed by having _two_
directories _in parallel_.  As to the possibility of removing "about_lynx"
breaking links in freenets, I see the other side, it's just another way to
prod sysadmins to update their documentation.  As for the placement of the
COPY* files, I can't see "about_lynx" as the place for them.  If anything,
they probably should be in the top directory (rather than docs, that I
originally proposed).

I would like to see some of my editing of the top-level "README" file
be implemented.  It bugs me to no end to read in there "Current versions of
Lynx run on Unix and VMS."  I would like to go even further than I did in
SIMPLEDIR to combine the three files "README", "DESC" and "RELEASE_STATEMENT".
I think it would be easier to maintain only one file "README", rather than
three (which are redundant in certain areas anyway).  The README file really
should be checked and edited with every new release (but I won't be
volunteering unless there's at least a hint from others that it might be a
good idea).

__Henry
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