LYNX-DEV Lynx and autoconf (was Re: post-2.7 ?)

[Klaus Weide]

I don't know how much you (Jim Spath and T.E.D.) have looked into
the .../Implementation/tcp.h system dependencies, or whether that is
out of scope for now (I haven't looked at your patchfiles yet).
But the following may be of interest:

In September I worked on a replacement for the tcp.h file (and HTUtils.h), 
with the ultimate goals to (1) make all those system dependencies
autoconf-igurable, and (2) move towards a tcp.h file with the definitions
needed by Lynx as well as by the current libwww 5 (so it would be easier
to incorporate code from the current W3C Reference Library into Lynx).

I tried to preserve all definitions needed by the (then-current) Lynx
code, and define them in terms of symbols determined by an
autoconf-generated config.h (if available) - while also preserving
things for VMS and adding things for WINDOWS and Mac that were supported
by the libwww code.

The results can still be found at 
  <URL: http://www.tezcat.com/~kweide/lynxhacks/2.6plus/>.

However, note:
1) It hasn't been updated since then.
2) Only ever tested on Linux.
3) I've never learned how to work with autoconf (i.e. how to create
   ./configure scripts).  I just took the config.h file created by
   *the W3C libwww's* installation procedure, and built on that.
   (but since the current W3C libwww apparently comes with all the
   necessary files from which a configure script is created, I should
   be easy to adapt those to have the desired symbols defined in a
   config.h which is then included by tcp.h - I just never learned
   how to do it.)
4) I haven't done anything for the Makefiles.

In other words, what I tried:
(1) Take the system-dependent preprocessor symbols as detected by an
    already existing ./configure 
(2) Translate the system dependencies expressed by those symbols to 
    the "language the lynx code understands", i.e. define symbols and
    include header files based on (1) as Lynx code expects to find them.
    (The alternative would be to heavily modify a lot of *.h and *.c
    files which seemed even less inviting than messing up just one tcp.h
    file...)

Maybe this is useful in the context of your efforts?


On Tue, 18 Feb 1997, T.E.Dickey wrote:

> I forgot to mention _where_
> 
>       http://www.clark.net/pub/dickey/lynx/lynx.html (page)
>       ftp.clark.net:/pub/dickey/lynx/patches (current/recent patches)

T.E., a lot of your pages link to *.tgz files which are then served with
headers like the following:
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Server: Netscape-Commerce/1.12
Date: Wednesday, 19-Feb-97 02:52:51 GMT
Last-modified: Monday, 17-Feb-97 14:16:58 GMT
Content-length: 9383
Content-type: text/plain

It would be nice if you could change that, to have the files come with
more appropriate HTTP headers - like the following (for *.tgz or *.tar.gz)

Content-encoding: gzip           (or x-gzip)
Content-type: application/x-tar  (or at least application/octet-stream)

Even on a Netscape server that should be possible somehow :)

  Klaus


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