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Asynchronous emacs-w3m -patch



Greetings,

More than three months ago I mailed a patch to make emacs-w3m
partially asynchronous.  I got criticism for not supporting
non-asynchronous operation anymore because some Emacs versions (I
was quite surprised to hear that XEmacs on Windows was one of
them; I hope they have fixed this since) apparently don't support
it.  I didn't have time or energy back then to do anything about
the situation but recently I started merging three months of
emacs-w3m mainline development into my version.  I finally got that
done.

Non-asynchronous operation is now supported by respecting
w3m-async-exec variable, although that variable is not initialized
in any clever way because I don't know exactly what Emacs versions
don't support asynchronous operation.  Images are now loaded
asynchronously too but this works only with Emacs 21 at the moment
(it doesn't work at all with other Emacs versions).  If the same
image is on the page at multiple locations, it is loaded several
times.  There are still several glitches in addition to that image
support.  For example, bad things will surely happen if you are
downloading images and do something to the buffer displaying the
WWW page those images are supposed to end up to.  Some variables
that should be customizable, aren't.  Some documentation strings
may not be up-to-date.  I haven't tested downloading or any of the
additional functionality such as antenna and that shimbum stuff.
There is no easy way to kill active processes.  And so on.  But the
basics are there and normal browsing works for me with Emacs 21
well enough that I'm more happy to use my version than the mainline
emacs-w3m.

In short: consider this an alpha version or a technology preview.

I'm not including a change log entry because I doubt you are
interested in merging this work to the development version of
emacs-w3m, at least not now.  It would be nice to know, though,
whether you might be interested in merging this work when it gets
more polished.  FWIW, it may take over a month before I can work on
this again because I have be writing my diploma thesis.

This patch is against CVS version (trunk) as of 20011029T1628Z.

-- 
Hannu
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Attachment: emacs-w3m-async-20011030T0918Z.patch.bz2
Description: A patch to make emacs-w3m asynchronous