Summary of changes in Lynx v2.8.5

This list only summarizes some changes, for a detailed history of changes see the CHANGES file.

• Linux (ncurses, ncursesw, PDCurses, slang),
• FreeBSD 3.1, 4.1, 4.9, 5.1 (ncurses, ncursesw),
• NetBSD 1.5, 1.6 (curses)
• OpenBSD 2.8 (curses/ncurses).
• OpenVMS (curses),
• OS/2 EMX (ncurses),
• win32 (Visual C++ 6.0 and Borland C++, Cygwin, MinGW32, DJGPP),
• AIX 4.3, 5.1 (curses),
• Darwin 5.5 (ncurses),
• HPUX 11 (curses),
• QNX 6.1 (ncurses),
• IRIX 6.5 (curses),
• SunOS 4.1.4 (curses)
• Solaris 8, 9 (curses)
• Tru64 4.0d, 5.1 (cc, curses),

• file-upload is supported, configured-in by default.
• implement support for bzip compression by internal calls to libbz2
• add configure option --enable-locale-charset, which adds configure settings and an option-menu checkbox telling lynx if it should use the function call nl_langinfo(CODESET) to find the display character set rather than rely on the user to set it via lynx.cfg or the options menu
• lots of changes to improve performance.

• improve SSL support:
  • modify configure script and related ifdef's to build with gnutls 0.8.9
  • add configure option --with-gnutls, to allow lynx to be built with gnutls. Used gnutls 0.8.6 on Redhat 8.0 to login at yahoo (gnutls is not very portable, so this is an experimental option)
  • add FORCE_SSL_PROMPT setting to lynx.cfg, allowing for manipulation in the options menu and (if LYNXRC_ENABLE is set) via the .lynxrc file. This lets the user decide whether to ignore prompting for questionable aspects of an SSL connection. If the prompts are ignored, a corresponding message is displayed
  • check for no common name (CN) in certificate when connecting via SSL.
  • share SSL handle between HTTP.c and HTAAUtil.c so that call of HTAA_shouldRetryWithAuth() from HTLoadHTTP() updates the handle used in that function. This makes lynx able to get the user/password prompt for https://enter.nifty.com/iw/
  • modify version shown for SSL to be derived from runtime SSLeay_version() function if linked with OpenSSL or SSLeay. Add corresponding definition for GNU TLS
  • improved certificate handling (case-insensitive domain-comparison, strip port-numbers from comparison).
  • add docs/README.sslcerts
  • add docs/README.rootcerts
• improve HTML interpretation:
  • do not strip parameters from refresh-URL
  • correct logic used for trimming TEXTAREA introduced in 2.8.4pre.3, which did not trim carriage-return characters if TRIM_INPUT_FIELDS was false.
  • modify HTLoadHTTP() to omit "Accept-Encoding: gzip" if command-line "-base" option is given. This makes

                    lynx -base -source excite.com
                
    

    work as expected. Otherwise, excite.com will transmit the document gzip'd, and the ensuing logic in HTSaveToFile() would see the mime-type as gzip rather than text/html, and not prepend the base URL
  • add NcFTP-style ftp-URLs which are supported by Netscape and wget
  • suppress "charset=" clause on form submission if it is iso-8859-1
  • modify CacheThru_new() to accept "https:" URLs for source-caching
  • modify logic for S_litteral case in SGML_character() to recover from spaces between the '<', '>' and the corresponding end of the tag, e.g., <style >
    < style >
    < style >
    match "<style>", and </style >
    < /style >
    < /style >
    match "</style>"
  • recognize charset value in meta description even if content-type is not given.
  • quote field-names used when submitting form-data as suggested in RFC 2068
  • modify logic that handles goto-fragment (e.g., G #foo) to update the URL shown in the info page.
  • construct "Accept-Encoding" gzip/compress parameters based on whether lynx is built with zlib and/or gzip/compress paths are defined.
  • add check for HTTP headers using Netscape extension "Refresh", and if found, add a corresponding refresh-URL at the beginning of the document.
  • recognize local .php files as HTML files.
• improvements to character sets and display:
  • add PT154 charset support. See http://www.iana.org/assignments/charset-reg/PTCP154 for more information.
  • add alias for charsets "ISO-8859-8-I" and "ISO-8859-8-E" to "iso-8859-8"
  • several new message files for localization: ca.po, cs.po, et.po, hu.po, it.po, tr.po uk.po, zh_CN.po, zh_TW.po
• improvements to color-style:
  • modify parse_style() function to operate on a copy of its parameter, to avoid changing it. Otherwise, when parse_style() is executed as a side effect of start_curses(), its data is modified and not valid on successive calls.
  • added hot.paste style which puts a right-arrow at the UR corner (which is currently unused). Clicking on it initiates a GOTO to the current selection (same as PASTE_URL action). The hot.paste style is disabled unless STYLES and CUT_AND_PASTE are both enabled, and the user defines hot.paste in the ".lss" file
• improve interaction with user:
  • allow more than two lines to be highlighted in links
  • promote a few configure script defaults to "enable": source-cache, prettysrc and read-eta.
  • add traces for lynx.cfg and .lynxrc to report lines which are not found in the symbol table, to help diagnose when a user adds lynx.cfg information to .lynxrc
  • modify dired support to allow sorting by a variety of things in addition to the existing sort into files versus directories. This is saved in ~/.lynxrc as dir_sort_order.
  • modify LYdownload_options(), adding a link to view the temporary file if the downloaded file is text or html.
  • modify LYwouldPush(), omitting the download page from list of user-interface pages which should not be pushed onto the history stack when visiting another page, such as info or help. Otherwise the downloaded file is discarded.
  • modify -dump, -source and related options which set dump mode to also set -nopause
  • for configurations that provide scrollbar, add a checkbox to the Options menu to enable or disable it
  • localized displayed strings used for popups in options menu
  • split up remove_file() in LYLocal.c so directory removal is performed in a separate function remove_directory(). Neither will perform an "rm -rf", but only single operations "rm" and "rmdir". The original behavior can be obtained by setting RMDIR_PATH to point to a script which does "rm -rf" in lynx.cfg .
  • use keycode bound to ^Q to control whether table cells are centered. The command-line -center option also controls this behavior.
  • add SHOW_KB_NAME to allow user to decide whether to display "KB" or "Kib" or even "Kilobytes" for the progress message
  • add command-line & menu option/config variables to replace the compile-time UNDERLINE_LINKS definition.
  • modify prompt for file- or directory-name in rename/move operation to provide a default based on the selected file/directory
  • add popen-based support for cut/paste. This is a slightly reworked patch to GNU readline. If RL_PASTE_CMD and RL_CLCOPY_CMD are defined in the environment, lynx will use them as commands to do cut&paste. The simplest such commands could just store/retrieve things from /tmp/.clipboard_user-name; more advanced ones could use X clipboard
• improve interaction with other programs:
  • Change configure script so that dired support for chmod, copy, mkdir, and touch to use built-in functions rather than external programs
  • add check for broken ProFTPD 1.2.5rc1, e.g., at ftp://ftp.oldskool.org/pub, and force a reconnection if an error 550 is detected when doing RETR. This is ifdef'd with BROKEN_PROFTPD and checks version
  • change default ftp mode to passive.
  • if ftp connection fails, automatically retry, switching between passive and active modes. Do this retry switching only when connecting to a different host.
  • modify configure check for tar to test several common variants including star, modify makefile.in to use the configured 'tar' program.
• improve cookie support:
  • add FORCE_COOKIE_PROMPT setting to lynx.cfg, allowing for manipulation in the options menu and (if LYNXRC_ENABLE is set) via the .lynxrc file. This lets the user decide whether to ignore prompting for cookies with invalid syntax. If the prompts are ignored, a corresponding message is displayed
  • revert 2.8.4dev.21 change to avoid truncating cookie path. The server that wouldn't work with the current lynx behavior is identified as "Oracle_Web_Listener/4.0.8.2.3EnterpriseEdition".
  • modify to trim carriage-returns as well as line-feeds, making it possible to share cookie files between platforms that have different line-terminations.
• improvements to debug/traces:
  • define additional -trace-mask option, 8=config
  • add environment variable LYNX_TRACE_FILE which, if given, overrides the compiled-in value of Lynx.trace (or LY-TRACE.LOG). This specifies the name of the trace file relative to the home directory.
  • allow trace file to be written when one already exists.
  • add command-line option --find-leaks to disable the memory leak checking code, allowing one to build an executable which is useful for both normal and leak-checking.
• improvements to scripting/logging:
  • implement a "set" command for command-scripts, allowing the script writer to manipulate the sleep-times for messages
  • implement an "exit" command for command-scripts.
  • stop reading from the command script when an end-of-file is detected.
  • change LYKeycodeToString() to provide a default translation for characters which are not key-symbols, etc., so they may be used in command scripts with the -cmd_script option
  • add REPLAYSECS config value to allow slowing command scripts down, for testing
  • add -delay option, to make progress messages slow, along with corresponding code for lynx.cfg

• add samples/keepviewer script, to illustrate how to retain a temporary file for use in an external viewer
• add samples/lynxdump script, to illustrate how to use lynx -dump with no link references
• add two test files for testing UTF-8, based on Markus Kuhn's demos (quickbrown.html and utf-8-demo.html), tested with ncurses' wide-character configuration on XFree86 xterm.
• add koi8-r.html as a test for non-ANSI 8-bit displays.

• none
  (it seems to run everywhere, but there are a few possibilities)

• UNIX:
  • modify configure script to accept --with-screen=ncursesw, to build with the wide-character version of ncurses
  • fix ifdef's for alloca(), e.g., on AIX 4
  • fix initialization of LYlines and LYcols for curses configurations other than ncurses which implement pads
  • modify local directory sort by type to ignore leading '.' characters when looking for filetype
• WIN32:
  • several small fixes to HTFile.c to make directory listings work properly on win32, e.g., stat'ing a directory with a trailing slash failed.
  • change HTURLPath_toFile() to keep local URLs distinct from remote ones, so win32 version will not display misleading drive letter on ftp listings.
  • undef conflicting symbols "small" and FILE_DOES_NOT_EXIST which are misdefined in Cygwin's w32api headers
  • modify expansion of %s for WIN_EX EXTERN commands so that short names (used when the command begins with an uppercase character) are not quoted, and use backslashes. The normal %s expansion uses forward slashes and may quote the name if it contains a blank
  • rewrote function that gives the home-directory string, adding checks for "My Documents" on Windows 2000, and ensuring that the resulting directory actually exists.
  • modify LYGetHostByName() in HTTCP.c to use the threaded _WINDOWS_NSL code for all Cygwin machines. The ability to interrupt nameserver lookup has not worked in Win98 using the Cygwin port, despite defining _WINDOWS_NSL. It looks like the threaded code was only for WinNT. At least under Cygwin, that code also seems to work fine under Win98
  • modify logic of HTDirEntry() to avoid storing a trailing backslash (DOS-style path separator) in the anchor URL for local directory entries
  • add -scrsize option and corresponding SCREEN_SIZE value to lynx.cfg to allow lynx's screensize to be specified. To display background color properly, this also requires a patch to PDCurses: http://www.t3.rim.or.jp/~patakuti/tmp/lynx/PDCurses-2.5.patch.resize This requires PDCurses 2.5 and higher
• DJGPP:
  • modified to use the configure script
  • support DJGPP's two forms of file addressing, [a-zA-Z]:[/\\] and /dev/[a-zA-z]/
  • 'z' can abort connection attempt as on UNIX.
  • fix inability to break out of a hung nameserver lookup or hung connection attempt without aborting lynx entirely.
  • added some fixes for "/" vs "\" handling in pathnames so that non-DJGPP programs will see standard DOS pathnames when called.
  • for DJGPP, escape all backslashes in commands given to LYSystem() when a Unix-style shell is given in $SHELL
  • enable -connect_timeout option for DJGPP
• OS/2:
  • add environment variable LYNX_LOCALEDIR to simplify configuration on OS/2 EMX.
  • modify remove_bookmark_link() to assume that OS/2 EMX does not allow rename of a file overwriting an existing one.
• VMS:
  • modified VMS build scripts to allow linking with OpenSSL.

• add project version & date to lynx.cfg
• add some simple statistics to summary in Lynx.leaks report
• add malloc-sequence number to Lynx.leaks report, to help with debugging
• modify po/makefile.inn to substitute the PACKAGE and VERSION strings into lynx.pot automatically, and to remove the unused boilerplate header comment
• change the install procedure for lynx.cfg to attempt to update the file with the user's customizations if any, and to save the old configuration information in a series, e.g., lynx.cfg-1, lynx.cfg-2, etc.
• add configure options to link with dbmalloc and dmalloc debugging libraries which offer different features than --enable-find-leaks
• collect names of lynx.cfg and .lynxrc variables into LYrcFile.h, to simplify checks for matching spelling, e.g., against the values used in LYOptions.c

• modify a syslog() call to guard against possible '%' in its parameter.
• strip username from URLs used in an HTTP GET, and warn about this condition. The example given was

              "http://www.microsoft.com&item%3dq209354@212.254.206.213/1338825GHU_98.asp"
          
  

  the text of which could mislead a user into believe it was an official site
• escape blanks and other non-7bit graphic characters in startfile and similar addresses to guard against interpreting the address as multiple lines during a GET, etc.

• A lot of bug fixes
• A lot of documentation changes.
• A lot of dead code removed