Re: SUCCESS!! Was: Re: http://www.flora.org/lynx-dev/html/month1098/msg00893.html

[pg]

In a recent note, Martin Kraemer said:

> Date: Fri, 20 Nov 1998 11:11:55 +0100
> From: Martin Kraemer <address@hidden>
> X-Organization: Siemens AG (Muenchen, W.Germany)
> X-Disclaimer: THE COMMENTS CONTAINED IN THIS MESSAGE REFLECT THE
>     VIEWS OF THE WRITER AND ARE NOT NECESSARILY THE VIEWS OF SIEMENS AG
> X-No-Junk-Mail: I do not want to get *any* junk mail.
> 
> Just out of curiosity I fetched lynx2.8.2dev.4.zip after your
> announcement that the OS390 EBCDIC changes had been incorporated
> into standard lynx.
> 
> And tried to compile it on BS2000.
> 
> And BINGO!!! The EBCDIC charset was detected right away, and a first
> quick test shows that lynx 2-8-2b4 runs on BS2000 and displays most
> pages as expected.
> 
I'm delighted to learn the Lynx/EBCDIC user/developer population
has doubled.  :-)

> This OS is `different enough' (i.e., not at all similar, except for
> the char set) from IBM's OS390 that I can say that you did a
> tremendous job with the portability!
> 
Rather, the credit belongs to lynx-dev for the tremendous and growing
intrinsic portability of Lynx; to Thomas E. Dickey for readily
incorporating the POSIX compliance patches I've suggested over the
past few months; and to GNU for autoconfigure.  It was through
ignorance rather than design that I made the one choice that
may have contributed to BS2000 compatibility:  I handcrafted the
translation tables -- I might have used OS/390 intrinsics had I
been aware of them.

> Areas in which I will have to investigate further:
> 
> a) POST data seem to have problems on my machine (wrong MIME type?
>    not converted to ASCII?). Must see into it.
> 
> b) mailto: address links tried to send mail to address@hidden
>    with some warning message about invalid character sets when I tried to
>    send a mail.
> 
None of our OS/390 run sendmail, so I had no incentive (nor indeed
opportunity) to test mailto: URLs.

> c) inlined images are transcribed with "]ALT text]" instead of "[ALT text]"
>    here. Maybe a difference between IBM's and Siemens' EBCDIC<->8859.1
>    tables.
> 
> Sorry, I have no details yet, as I was so excited to tell you that it
> runs that I didn't take the time to do more investigation.
> 
>     Martin
> 
> PS: Feel free to forward this information to the list.
> 
It would be false modesty indeed to hoard such effusive praise :-)  Done.

-- gil