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Re: lynx-dev overuse of system-specific conditionals (was: cygwin patch)


From: Klaus Weide
Subject: Re: lynx-dev overuse of system-specific conditionals (was: cygwin patch)
Date: Tue, 2 May 2000 13:10:14 -0500 (CDT)

On Mon, 1 May 2000, Doug Kaufman wrote:
> How many other places in lynx have platform-specific code that was
> introduced without full evaluation?

Lots, is my impression.  The more specific it is, the more likely that
it's wrong, that bugs won't be found (or not reported).

I'm suspicious of all the *_EX code, including WIN_EX.  Small example,
that doesn't involve any windows-specific function in an obvious way:
in LYConvertToURL (LYUtils.c),

   #ifdef WIN_EX   /* 1998/07/31 (Fri) 09:09:03 */
                   HTUnEscape(temp2);      /* for LFN */
   #endif

This is clearly wrong, part of the string in temp2 gets HTUnEscape'd
twice (easy to see if you look at the HTUnEscape(cp) a few lines above
that, and then follow the cat and copy operations).  Yet someone thought
that this, for some unexplained reason, is an improvement "for LFN".

I'm quite sure it's wrong, yet someone explicitly wanted it, so I didn't
bother to report it (the person who added the line is likely not reading
the list anyway).

I guess the deal with using WIN_EX is: You get some added Windows-specific
functionality (for example, what's provided by the WIN_EX'd functions in
LYUtils.c that call Windows API functions).  You also get a lynx that
may work ok most of the time, but fail in unexpected and unexplainable
ways when you do something slightly unusual (like, pass it filenames with
certain characters, or invoke it from some directories).

      Klaus



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