Re: lynx-dev Cookie problems?

[Rob Partington]

> Instead of having a bunch of lines in the file, have a directory witha
> bunch of files known as 'lhs' where the content of the file is 'rhs'.

This is what IE does and, to be honest, I prefer it that way.

> You get builtin time stamps that way fromt he file system as well.
> 
> Though this does have the drawback of requiring appropriate file system
> level support (ie, subdirs, long file names, etc).  Oh well, maybe not.

To handle IE cookies you need one subdirectory, and long filenames, *but*
the filenames are stored in an index, so you don't actually need them to
be related to the cookie at all...  I have an alpha patch to my lynx that
lets me use IE cookies - it's broken because I can't quite figure out 
where IE puts the expiry time, but it works.

For me, a lynx that uses one or the other is no good.  I switch between
Lynx, Netscape and IE randomly, and it would be nice if all three could
share the cookies.  As it stands, Lynx can read the cookies from the other
two with no problems, the other two can't (but I have a script that tries
to synchronise the Netscape and IE cookies with the same expiry time 
problem as noted above.)

Using a directory makes the problem of multiple Lynxen accessing the
cookies slightly simpler.  You have to check for the existence of the
cookie before you send it (ie stat()) which should automatically pick
up any new cookies.  Assuming you don't mind a stat() every request,
which I'm not sure is any great additional load...  It also simplifies
the question of when to write out the cookie jar - never, it's constantly
being updated and you never need to do a sync() when you quit lynx. 

The only time you have to worry is if Lynx crashes in the middle of 
writing a cookie or the index file.  With a suitably robust format,
which the IE one appears to be from my quick glances at it, and backups,
things might never go horribly wrong.  :->

ObRandomLynx: my object tree is now in Lynx, and is being tested.  You can't
do anything with it yet, but it successfully builds an object tree based
on what the SGML parsing mode of Lynx passes to it.  Next step is to add
some simplistic rendering and display routines to show the tree, which 
hopefully will get done today.
-- 
rob partington    personal: <URL: mailto:address@hidden >
  programmer     lynx mail: <URL: mailto:address@hidden >
 browser.org  lynx hacking: <URL: http://lynx.browser.org/rp/ >