Re: Adding the "links" text mode web browser to the base system

[Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg%britannica.bec.de@localhost>]

On Sat, Oct 31, 2009 at 01:19:52PM +0200, Alan Barrett wrote:
> I would like to add the "links" text mode web browser to the NetBSD
> base system.  It has a GPLv2 licence, and I would add it under
> src/external/gpl2/links, and make it install as /usr/bin/links.
> A MKLINKS build-time option could prevent building it.  The i386
> executable is 1064887 bytes unstripped, 1009916 bytes stripped.

First of all, I'm not entirely oppossed to a web browser in base, but
there are a number of critical requirement it would have to fulfill:

(1) It has to be small. I don't think links falls into that category,
especially because it is monolithic and can't be used for other
purposes.

(2) It should be BSD licensed. At least one of the three text mode
browsers is, so w3m might be a starting point for further work.

(3) It should be able to deal with the relevant subset of modern
standards. That includes CSS for basic formatting and layout.

(4) It has to have active maintainers. Links is AFAIK practically dead.
The elinks fork has some interseting ideas like a fork of gettext.

Joerg