Re: lynx-dev lynxcgi and lynxexec problems

[Paul Slootman]

On Fri 06 Aug 1999, Klaus Weide wrote:

> I happen to have already seen your Debian bug report at
> <http://www.debian.org/Bugs/db/42/42494.html>.  Unfortunately you don't
> honor us here with the same level of detail.

I didn't know whether such a verbose message straight away would be
appreciated here... Especially if it happened to be something simple.

> The first thing you should do is look at the lynx.cfg from the current
> unstable (dev.N) lynx code.  See <http://sol.slcc.edu/lynx/current/>.
> If you just want to look at one file, you can find it by going into
> the "breakout" subdirectory from there, if you don't want to download
> the source.

OK, I've had a quick look, and it looks promising. It's too late to say
for sure though :-)

> Trust me, you want to understand the way lynxexec: etc. are controlled
> with TRUSTED_EXEC before you build something with it.

Yes, that's clear. Unfortunately I couldn't really find any clear
docs (the docs directory in 2.8.2 only contains announces and change
logs, which is a bit disconcerting when you first look for more
information).  I've been using lynx casually for a couple of years, so
the basics (as far as using it as a web browser is concerned) are clear.
It's just that when I tried to find more information about lynxexec
(which I was very happy to see that it exists!), it's very hard to do
so. What I often do in such cases is 'find -type f | xargs grep -li
subject' to see where the subject is listed, and then examine those
files. However, here the result is that it is only really documented in
the sample config file...

Please don't get me wrong, I know how hard it is to write
documentation! That's why I like exim so much, for example (see
www.exim.org, everything is explained in much detail).

> Your example (which you gave in the Debian bug report) should NOT work
> as given, neither with 2.8.2 nor with 2.8.1.  In fact, I tested it with
> the Debian 2.8.1-3 and confirmed that it did not work (as expected).
> You must have done something differently.

Damn. I just tried it, and you're right. I'm sure I had it working
somewhere... I'll check back on that.
However, you didn't report this to the BTS? I could have looked into
this earlier in that case; I waited a day before sending a message here.

> Basically, it's not supposed to work because "lynxcgi:/tmp/x.cgi" is
> not recognized as equivalent to "local".  But you can change that (and

Hmm, it looks pretty local to me :-)  But the concept of "local" is
probably different in lynx?

> we're back to reading the lynx.cfg description).

Yup.


Paul Slootman
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