Re: lynx-dev Lynx 2.8.2rel1: suggestion for --enable-color-style

[Klaus Weide]

On Fri, 4 Jun 1999, Rob Partington wrote:

> In message <address@hidden>, 
>            "Frederic L. W. Meunier" writes:
> > Hi. Since --enable-color-style only works if you use curses/ncurses, it's
> 
> No, look, it's still not true.  Something or someone has gone wrong 
> somewhere.  It was designed to work with either, and the #defines for
> the slang version are still in the distributed header files.  Somehow
> the code for the slang version has vanished.  No-one seems to know who,
> what, when or why, but it's vanished.  

I know why.  Since Tom and I took your original color-style code and
merged it with the then current devel code (at around 2.7, I think), and 
then tried to make it work - there were numerous inconsistencies and 
crashes, with nearly no useful comments, no instructions or documentation
from you - you didn't participate at all in any of that.  In fact, I don't
remember ever seeing *any* indication that you have even looked at the
merged code since then, as far as color styles are concerned.  You just
discouraged the effort, and said you had a "completely rewritten" and
"completely different" version:
<URL:http://www.flora.org/lynx-dev/html/month0597/msg00684.html>.
But that new-and-improved version never appeared, I am quite sure you
never announced something like it to lynx-dev since I was waiting for it,
and the "pre-alpha code" remained all we had to build on.

I have never seen a version that worked (or compiled) with color styles
and slang.  AFAIK, nobody except you has ever got this to work, with any
of the code you published or any of its descendants.

It took a lot of reverse engineering (over a long period of time) to more
or less understand how the color-style code (in that documentation-free
"pre-alpha" version, since that's all we had) was supposed to work with
(n)curses, at least for me, and there is still stuff I don't understand. 
There were some alternative versions of function and similar for use with
slang, but all that seemed incomplete and not in a working state.  No
wonder it got dropped. 

> I know it works, I wrote it and I use it.

You must be talking about something you never shared with lynx-dev.

  Klaus