Re: lynx-dev lynx2.8.3dev.5

[mattack]

On Sat, 31 Jul 1999, T.E.Dickey wrote:
>> We begin to face the same problems that Eric Allman has with sendmail; it  
>> has support for protocols he thinks, even hopes, are gone forever.  When he  
>> posts that he is considering removing them, its users leap from the woodwork
>> at high speed to protest.  The features stay, and sendmail grows... 
>
>yes - but in anticipation of their going away, he can ifdef them and make it
>simpler to drop the features.

Does taking out gopher and news and other non-web [except ftp] support,
via a compile time choice, improve the web browsing experience in any
way?

I imagine it greatly reduces the disk footprint of the lynx binary, and
subsequently could noticably lower the amount of time it takes lynx to
come up for the first time.

But does it actually speed up browing, going through links, etc. in any
noticable way?

If it can actually improve that in any noticable way (heck, even if you 
could measure a few seconds total saved in some specific browsing experience -
I say that as I'm dubbing a cool ABC News show called "Brave New World" where
they talk about how people are so impatient about various things, like 
dialing a rotary phone, even CD players that reduce the gap between songs from
3 seconds to 2).. ANYWAY.. Sorry for that tangent..

If it can improve things, _but still give a useful message when you try to
use a link that would be supported with a full Lynx_, then it seems reasonable
to be able to compile them out..  Or even move most of the code to separate
files filled with routines if it is not already.

If I were using Lynx-sans-gopher, and tried to use a gopher link, I'd sure 
hope that something along the lines of:

This program was compiled without gopher support. If you need it, ask your 
system administrator to recompile it with gopher support enabled.

(That would require multi-line status lines, but you get the idea.)

Basically:  Don't actually *rip out* the code, but it seems reasonable to
move it out of the way, and even eventually maybe turn some of it off by
default.