Re: WWW LineMode browser

Tim Berners-Lee (timbl)
Mon, 17 Feb 92 17:32:58 GMT+0100 

Date: Mon, 17 Feb 92 17:32:58 GMT+0100
From: timbl (Tim Berners-Lee)
Message-Id: <9202171632.AA18163@ nxoc01.cern.ch >
To: Eelco van Asperen <evas@cs.few.eur.nl>
Subject: Re: WWW LineMode browser
Cc: www-talk

> From: Eelco van Asperen <evas@cs.few.eur.nl>
>
> I've been working on a curses-version of the line mode browser
> and I think the code works reasonably well. The modifications
> I made to v1.1 have now been incorporated into v1.2. Most
> changes are in the form of #ifdef CURSES ... #endif.
> I've also added lots of checks where malloc ea. are used to
> make sure that they return a non-NULL pointer.

Great to have a curses full-screen browser!  Something we has always throught ought  
to be done, but hadn't had the time.  Send me the patches, and I'll insert them  
into our current code and into the next release.

> Unfortunately, the PC version keeps crashing lately; I'm not sure
> if the problem is the PC-NFS toolkit or the browser code.
> The program hangs when one of the PC-NFS toolkit routines tries 

> to free a memory block; this could be caused by a corrupted memory
> chain. This in turn can be caused by freeing some pointer that
> was not malloc'ed.  The code runs ok under Unix even when I add
> the malloc-debugging library.

Sounds like a PC-sepcific bug there... but you never know. We have found something  
weird with realloc() under aix but that looks like an aix bug.

> Some other points;
> - a lot of files (especially *.html and *.txt files) don't end
>   with a linefeed; the SCCS source code control system does not
>  like this. Perhaps this can be fixed in future releases ?

I think this may be Edit on the NeXT which is happy to leave an uncompleted line on  
the end of a file.  I'll have to look at it.

> - could you make context diffs from the last to the current
>  release ? This would make it easier to see what has changed
>  and merge those changes with the ones I've made to my copy
>  of the last release.

Assuming your patches are useful -- which they certainly have been up till now,  
we'll incorporate them into the release.

> So, if you are interested in my patches, please let me now and I'll
> send them.

	yes please!


__________________________________________________________
Tim Berners-Lee                       timbl@info.cern.ch
World Wide Web initiative             (NeXTMail is ok)	
CERN                                  Tel: +41(22)767 3755
1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland           Fax: +41(22)767 7155