Re: lynx-dev Cookie problems?

[brian j. pardy]

On Fri, 25 Sep 1998, Heikki Kantola wrote:

> I today compiled 2.8.1pre1 under digital UNIX without hassle, but I've
> run into few problems with cookies:
> - first persistant cookies support I chose to have doesn't appear to
> work as I don't see that Lynx would write anything to .lynx_cookies.

This is something that still needs to be fixed. Cookies (as of dev.28 or so,
and I believe are the same in pre1) are NOT written to .lynx_cookies unless 
you hit ^K to go to the cookie jar page.

It's easy enough to change this in the source, I'm not sure where we want 
to do it, though. Most likely at the beginning of the cleanup when exiting
lynx.

Any ideas/comments from Rob or anyone else?

> - also there seems to be something wrong with COOKIE_ACCEPT_DOMAINS
> variable as when I've put ".imdb.com" there and then try to register
> with <URL:http://us.imdb.com/Register/> I get "Unknown" in e-mail and
> nick name fields, while if accepting cookie manually I get those fine.

I'll investigate this one once I'm home from work. I can't think of 
anything offhand that would cause this, but I think there may be a 
couple strange things in Lynx's cookie handling.

For example, the New York Times pages <URL:http://www.nytimes.com/> ask
for user/password authentication when you go to a story, and after
authentication send you a cookie. Authentication will fail if you have
this cookie, but if you gobble it, you can continue through the site.

I'm not sure if it's a problem with Lynx's handling, or the servers not
following specs. Some sites seem to handle cookie-based authentication 
perfectly (example: slashdot -- <URL:http://www.slashdot.org/>).

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