Re: CERN LIBRARY OF COMMON CODE 3.0pre1 AVAILABLE

> As this is a major release, and folks will have to do a bit of re-tooling
> anyway, I highly recommend two more changes:
> 
> 1. Use a more traditional build setup, so folks can just do:
> 
> 	% zcat www-lib.tar.Z | tar xvf -
> 	% cd www-lib
> 	% ./configure
> 	% make
> 
> or use Imake, but I think configure is better.

Frederick Roeber has been working on gnu configure for the last weeks
and we are just about to get it into the Library code. It still needs
some testing but it looks promising! The current number of supported
platforms have shown that the BUILD script method doesn't scale.

Suggestions or comments on `how close wwe shall stick to the current
structure and how close we should be to the gnu structure' are
welcome!

> Prescribing that folks use this WWW/Library/Implementation directory
> structure may interfere with integrating the www-lib into other projects.
> I know it has interfered with several of mine.

> 2. Generate the HTML documentation from the C source, rather than
> the other way around. I expect that by now you know as well as I
> do how many hassles this would alleviate.

I would like a better integration between the .html or .h files and the
.c files using hyperlinks. Most of the documentation (including the
.html source files) have been updated, and also the documentation under

	http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Library/Status.html

but I still feel that we need some more integration! My idea was to add
the functionality to the LineMode Browser so that it could link
together .h and .c files, but maybe this feature is already available
in other tools?

A PC re-port of the code is also coming up. It is not much of a problem
to get it to compile on a PC, but it is more the problems we have
discussed before regarding malloc() and fprintf(stderr, ""). I suggest
that we change both into a macro having the first be a call-back
function to the application so that it can close down gracefully. It
will take some time before the library is strong enough to handle the
situation better, but turning many of the modules into state machines
does help a lot.

As mentioned in the release note, we intent to keep up the number of
releases so any comments and suggestions to the code are welcome!

-- cheers --

Henrik

Received on Sunday, 27 November 1994 14:48:01 UTC