Re: lynx-dev missed patch for dev.18/19 ? - absolute bookmark paths

[Klaus Weide]

On Fri, 5 Mar 1999, Larry W. Virden wrote:

> Re: problems with the bookmark patch at
> <URL:  http://www.flora.org/lynx-dev/html/month0299/msg01047.html >
> 
> 
> Whoops - sorry about that.  Those are all very good points.  However, 
> ownership
> of the HOME directory isn't _necessarily_ a given.  In a closed system,
> some userid like nobody for instance might own the directory
> and exclusive write access to the directory to try to limit certain
> types of 'breakout' activity.
> 
> Anyone interested enough in this patch to help me figure out how to do it
> 'better'? 

Not much help, rather some warnings (but don't let that discourage you :) ):

It's not just an omission, but a design decision, that bookmark files have
to reside under the user's home directory.

Not that this restriction does make a lot of sence _to me_, or
apparently to you, but it's there, and it may be assumed at a deeper
level than is apparent.

See the Users Guide, where the requirement is documented.  There is even
a new kind of syntactic convention invented for bookmark files: the
specification should start with ./ if and only if the file is in a
subdirectory of the home directory.  That convention isn't intuitive
for Unix users and doesn't have precendents afaik, but it's there.
My guess is that it makes more sense in VMS, where filenames (especially
absolute paths) are handled rather differently.

Anyway, it seems to me that just getting rid of a few LYAddPathToHome()
calls isn't enough, apart from the permission problems noted by Tom,
but I haven't looked closely.  At least, it should be tested whether
*all* the bookmark-related functions still work after the change
(for bookmarks in arbitrary locations, including multi-bookmarks); 
and this may break things completely for VMS, so that needs to be
tested too, or the code left unchanged for VMS.  (Not to mention DOS/Win -
I don't know whether all bookmarks functions work even now.)

(I use only the most basic bookmarks features, no multi etc. - not a
good basis for understanding what might break.)
   Klaus