Re: lynx-dev comments on "compile time settings"

[Bela Lubkin]

Philip Webb wrote:

> > Before anything else, download pre.8 (or 9 if Tom gets ahead of you)
> -- snip --
> 
> no, you've misunderstood (and i did make a nice clean build):
> the problem arose between 2-8pre.2 -- which was released February 1998 --
> & 2-8-1pre.6 -- a recent enough version of current development:
> it's a 2-8 vs 2-8-1 problem, not a problem within recent devt versions.
> i can look thro' CHANGES, but people who were working on Options
> should be able to locate individual changes more quickly than me.

Oh boy ... lots of change, everywhere, between those two versions.

It would help even more if you could pinpoint which release broke it.  I
dunno where you can find a repository of every release since forever...
Tom says the patches are available, I'm not sure where.  At least one
old intermediate version is still on sol.slcc.edu: 2.8.1dev.16.zip.  You
should at least check that one out.

> > do some system call traces.
> > Unix system call tracers are generally called trace, truss or strace.
> > Read the man page.  Most have an "attach to a running process" flag.
> > The methodology you want to use is: -- snip --
> 
> i'll have a look at your procedure & follow it if i can,
> BUT i have only one terminal -- my PC at home -- without a lot of fuss.
> i want to grab & try out  screen , but haven't got around to it.
> i am quite adept at getting computers to do things,
> but my experience is very limited in some areas.

Getting screen to build could be trivial, could be hard.

It isn't absolutely necessary to follow the careful procedure I
described.  I just ran:

  truss -o lynx.truss lynx /tmp/foo

went to the option menu, checkmarked "save", hit "accept", and quit.
The resulting file was 482 lines.  I then deleted everything before the
first reference to "/tmp/foo" and everything after the second (last)
reference, leaving 232 lines.  Adding "-cfg /dev/null" reduced it to 148
lines.  These are big, but not unmanagable.

In fact, delete everything up to before the line that says something
like "write(1, [...]aving Options[...]", and everything after the
subsequent reference to /tmp/foo.  That gets the successful save trace
down to 32 lines in my case.  The failed case will probably be even
shorter.

Oh -- and you should probably send 4 traces:

  - the old working version, saving a new .lynxrc

  - the old working version, saving over an existing .lynxrc

  - the new failing version, saving a new .lynxrc

  - the new failing version, failing to save over an existing .lynxrc

>Bela<