Re: LYNX-DEV help: finally!

[Jonathan Sergent]

Philip Webb wrote:

>first, that's buried away in Section VI

Agreed.  How to modify userdefs.h is given more precedence than
why not to modify it for those who attempt to put too much effort
into installing this program.

Another suggested change is to move the userdefs.h define out of the
"YOU MUST CHANGE THIS ON UNIX" section. (Maybe this happened in pre.5.)
This surely could confuse first time installers who don't know how things
"used to be".

>& second, it doesn't say anything about removing  config.cache ,
>which was the problem in my case (not  make clean ).

make distclean does that.  Fiddling with things to the point that one 
could run configure multiple times without needing ``make distclean'' 
would be the right way to fix this problem now that we're committed to 
autoconf--a good thing for portability's sake, and a much nicer way to 
configure and install things IMHO.  It's also become somewhat standard 
among many other free software packages.

>and -- having slept on it -- i repeat my question:
>why does 2-8 take the location of  lynx.cfg  from  config.cache
>& not always from  userdefs.h ?  surely that should be corrected.

No, it should not take it from userdefs.h.

Read what I wrote to Henry.  You tell Lynx where you want it to install
the binary and the configuration file with configure since it makes the
install rule.  Lynx needs to look for the config file the same place its
makefile installs it.  Separating the definition that says "where does it
put the sample lynx.cfg when I type make install" and the definition that
says "where does lynx look for lynx.cfg when I run it" would make things 
MORE confusing.  You don't use make install, which is not the average
case.

This option should not be in userdefs.h at all for Unix, it should be in 
a separate section.  Right now it's in a section that says "you must 
change this" and then there is a comment next to it that says "don't 
change it" and INSTALLATION says "do change it" (or did say that).  If 
someone would re-arrange userdefs.h slightly then the average Unix users
would have an easier time.  I would do so but I'm in Chattanooga for the
week while my machine is back on campus.

I personally don't touch userdefs.h at all.  Essentially everything that
is in there that is not a security option is configurable at runtime with
lynx.cfg, or at least that was the design principle.

It used to be that modifying #define LYNX_CFG_FILE to match your install 
directory in the Makefile was a required modification, but that burden is 
now removed.


-- 
Jonathan Serent / address@hidden