Re: LYNX-DEV Forked image DL?

[Al Gilman]

to follow up on what Klaus Weide said:

> On Sun, 16 Nov 1997, Lars Marowsky-Bree wrote:
> 
> > On 1997-11-16T12:57:00,
> >    Al Gilman <address@hidden> said:
> > 
> > > You might want to look in the code to see if one could use Wget
> > > as an external downloader as opposed to forking another Lynx.
> > 
> > I keep running into a problem with the external downloader (which I make
> > extensive use of):
> 
> What do you (both of you) mean with "external downloader"?
> 
>  - The development code's EXTERNAL / USE_EXTERNAL (see devel lynx.cfg), or
>  - something else?

There are both similarities and differences.

Same:

        use another program

        download runs in another thread or process

Different:

        separate-process download invoked by same command (when 
        background downloading enabled) as by-lynx download (when disabled).

        multiple external programs configured into Lynx independently,
        as with the editor today.

The last time I had an idea what EXTERNAL does it gave you a
gateway to one program outside Lynx.  If you want to have Pine
and Wget both accessed this way, you have to create your own
selector menu and make the selector menu script be the EXTERNAL
routine known to Lynx.  This may be erroneous, I am flying by
memory, here.

It would be yet better if analogous to the mime.types database
which tells you what external program to use to display objects
by their MIME type, it were possible to indicate which external
helpers should be launched to get resources under the "download"
user command.  This would probably be indexed by URL scheme, not
MIME type.

People with lots of process resources would want to configure
background downloads in this way, while sites which have to guard
the process resources consumed by any one user would disable it.

-- Al Gilman
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