lynx-dev Re: LYNX-DEV user agent?

[Michael Sokolov]

   Bela Lubkin <address@hidden> wrote:
> If you truly revere Fote as much as you claim, you should not be going
> against his strongly expressed desire.
   
   If you bother to look at my more recent postings, you'll see that I am
actually supporting Fote here.
   
> Of course, this has very little relevance, since there is no evidence to
> suggest that there ever will be an actual Sokolov version of Lynx.
   
   Fortunately it matters the least to me what evidence do you see. I will
start working on Lynx as soon as this project reaches the top of my
priority queue, and I don't care one way or another what evidence do you
see.
   
> You'll whip it out just as soon as you finish writing your own operating
> system, building your own farm of creaky minicomputers, writing a socket
> layer for DOS, and arguing about silly fundamentalist user-hostile
> environments that nobody but yourself care about.  Uh huh.
   
   As for the farm of minicomputers, I already have one VAX up and running.
It is blackwidow.cwru.edu, the machine I am sending this message through
and doing all of my E-mail and other work on. It's running Ultrix, which
has the solid BSD foundation but suffers from the crappy commercial
packaging. I have no problem with setting up the rest of my VAXen, but I'm
not going to do this with Ultrix, I first need to get copies of at least
4.3BSD-Tahoe and 4.3BSD-Reno. This (obtaining the copies) is by far the
most difficult task I will ever undertake. If/when I manage to do that the
rest will be a piece of cake.
   
   I am not going to WRITE MY OWN operating system, I am going to tweak
4.3BSD-* to support a wider variety of VAX CPUs and peripherals. This can
wait, however, since I have some VAXen that are fully supported already,
and I can do my Lynx work on them.
   
   As for DOSSOCK, I'll definitely need it simply because it will be the
most important of my additions to Lynx. There are some minors things that I
can do before that, though. There are lots of things that I could get
started on already. The crux of the matter is that until I obtain copies of
the damn tapes I am totally paralyzed.
   
   Nonetheless, I'll probably release my first mods in a couple of weeks,
as Lynx v2.7.2 doesn't compile on Ultrix/VAX and I need to fix this, since
I'm now using my VAX for all of my work (hey, I'm sending this message
through it!) and it's inconvenient having to log into my account on the CES
system to run Lynx.
   
> Instead of investing so much energy in arguing about which useful parts
> of Lynx are Eeeevil Because They're From The Wrong Coast, why don't you
> actually develop some of the features you've mentioned?
   
   If you mean features like the DOSSOCK version, I WILL develop it, but
first I have to finish my work for the University. Without that I wouldn't
have access to the University's resources and wouldn't be able to do any
development work at all.
   
> Integrating
> them into the ongoing Lynx work [...]
   
   Just to clear any misunderstandings, MY version is the ongoing Lynx
work, i.e., the work that starts where His Majesty Foteos Macrides has left
off and stays 100% faithful to the True Lynx ideology defined by Him. Mr.
Dickey's version does not meet the above criteria and is therefore a side
branch, not the ongoing Lynx work.
   
> [...] would allow you to build your own
> versions with those features, plus any other worthwhile features, while
> turning off anything you're against.
   
   Turning off? Really? How would you do this for autoconf?
   
> Going off in your own direction
> will mean that you'll have to personally shepherd any new additions to
> the code.
   
   IF I want these additions (i.e., if they would be acceptable to, say,
Fote). That's a very big if. So far the vast majority of the mods I see in
Mr. Dickey's version are either loose cannons like autoconf or severely
misguided developments like Lynx for the Gates of Hell. OTOH, if you are
talking about real developments like table support, it's a big open
question who gets there first: Mr. Dickey or me. I'm actually thinking
about tackling table support or something like that so that I could steal
supporters from Mr. Dickey and help bring the demise of his version and the
rise of mine.
   
> [...] I trust his *demonstrated* abilities as a
> programmer far more than any fanciful abilities of someone who hasn't
> even begun to code "his version".
   
   Fortunately it matters the least to me what do you trust.
   
   Sincerely,
   Michael Sokolov
   Phone: 440-449-0299
   ARPA Internet SMTP mail: address@hidden