------------------ Alternative WWWOFFLE Announcement ------------------
I've been using WWWOFFLE on Linux for a number of years now, and during the last year I have been actively making modifications in the source code. I've fixed some bugs, added a few features, and sometimes just modified the code to suit my personal taste. Even though I like the overall structure of WWWOFFLE, I disagree with a number of the implementation details and I've changed most of the things I didn't like. Out of respect for the free-software community, I'm making the modifications I've made available as a patch file wwwoffle-2.7e-par.diff.gz. The URL for a webpage where this patch is made available can be found at the end of this message. The file wwwoffle-2.7e-par.diff.gz can be used to patch AMB's original version 2.7e source. After that you can study the modifications I've made in the code, but you can also compile, install, and run wwwoffled in the traditional manner. Here's a summary of some of the most important modifications I've made: - More conservative treatment of headerlines. Headerlines with the same "key" are no longer combined. This prevents problems where a comma can act both as part of a value or as a separator between values (e.g. the infamous "Set-Cookie" problem). Furthermore server-headers are not censored before being stored in the cache, only at the time they are sent to the browser. - I've added an option called session-cookies-only. When enabled, WWWOFFLE strips the "expires" field from "Set-Cookie:" server headers. Most browsers will not store such cookies permanently and forget them in between sessions. - The URL Configuration webpages have been debugged and enhanced. Very useful if you want to see how WWWOFFLE is configured for a particular URL. - I've split the CensorHeader section into two sections: CensorIncomingHeader and CensorOutgoingHeader. I find this conceptually cleaner. - URL-specifications are allowed to have a so-called parameters part. This allows you to use something like "http://*.com/images*;*sz=120x480*";. In the original version of WWWOFFLE a URL specification containing a ';' in the path part will never match. - I've added an option "cache-control-no-cache" that can be used in the offline section of the configuration file. This option works similarly to "pragma-no-cache" and can be used to reduce the number of outgoing requests that are generated when you hit the reload button of your web-browser while offline. - More efficient handling of CGI-scripts. Closer adherence to the CGI-specification. - I've fixed a bug that sometimes caused webpages to be incompletely decompressed. - I've improved the efficiency of case-insensitive pattern matching by eliminating the need for temporary allocation of strings on the heap in strstrn(). A more detailed list of the changes I've made can be found in the README.par file in the source directory after patching. Happy hacking. -- Paul A. Rombouts <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> My alternative WWWOFFLE implementation page: http://www.phys.uu.nl/~rombouts/wwwoffle.html
