$Library = 'libwww-perl/0.40';
__END__
The first line of this file sets the User-Agent and Version number of
libwww-perl and should not be changed unless you have modified the code
to work beyond its originally intended purpose AND permission has been
obtained from Roy Fielding at <fielding@ics.uci.edu>.
Changes to libwww-perl
======================
# $Id: LWP_Changes.pl,v 1.1 1994/09/21 01:53:03 fielding Exp $
See the files README.html and Artistic.txt for licensing and distribution info.
See the file INSTALL.txt for installation information.
If you have any suggestions, bug reports, fixes, or enhancements,
send them to the libwww-perl mailing list at <libwww-perl@ics.uci.edu>.
Known problems
Documentation of the library architecture is sorely lacking,
although the code itself is fairly easy to read and understand.
Things that need to be done (let us know if you are working on something good)
Interfaces to FTP, Gopher, WAIS, ...
A real HTML (or SGML) parser.
NOTE: Version numbers increment according to the significance of the new
changes. The major number is incremented only for large overhauls
of the code or changes in the basic architecture/interface which
makes if incompatible with prior releases. The first minor number
reflects a change in the interface (such as a new library or a new
method for making requests) which is still compatible with the old.
The last number reflects minor bug fixes and documentation updates.
Version 0.40 September 20, 1994
Changed the name of this file from Changes.txt to LWP_Changes.pl
and moved the $www'Library version name so that it can be set here.
Added a new Makefile to ease the installation process.
Added sys_socket_ph.c to help find problems in SVR4 system installs.
Added hostname.pl so that people can more easily/portably get host names.
Fixed more usage of undefined proxy environment vars (from Martijn Koster).
Revamped the "get" program: Added code to show original headers if they
were received; Added tout= to interactively change the timeout value;
Added ims= to interactively give If-Modified-Since; Added handling of
POST content suggested by Mel Melchner; Added command-line options,
debug and quiet modes such that the program is now ideal for testing
server/proxy responses to requests; Added "get -h" usage information.
Added $headers initialization to other test clients as well.
Fixed a number of problems with the handling of years in wwwdates.pl,
most of which were due to limitations in timelocal.pl, which goes into
an infinite loop if (year >= 2038). Now handles 2 and 4-digit years
regardless of date format.
In wwwhttp.pl, removed unnecessary bind() and host stuff (Jack Shirazi);
Added a bunch of alarm() calls to lessen timeout problems; Now replaces
empty paths with "/" (Marc VanHeyningen); Changed name of &timeout
routine to &timed_out to avoid confusion with $timeout parameter.
In wwwurl.pl, the parsing sets were renamed to match the IETF draft
on Relative URLs and the method used to test them was changed to use
bitmap masks. Modified parsing algorithm to use the new sets.
Parser now handles URLs like http://host:/ and uses the leftmost "?"
as the start of query info. Added caching of base URL components so
that they don't get re-parsed for every URL in a document. Now allows
lowercase hex digits in unescape().
Added a source code "contrib" directory at
<http://www.ics.uci.edu/WebSoft/libwww-perl/contrib/> for use as
a half-way house for wayward programs.
Version 0.30 August 1, 1994
Added the wwwmailcap.pl library for handling MIME mailcap files,
www'get_def_header() for reading the default headers, and www'lrequest()
for doing autoredirected requests (all submitted by Brooks Cutter).
Removed the default headers from the www'stat() interface.
Changed the testbot and wwwbot'allowed interface to make use of the
default User-Agent header.
Firmed-up the URL parsing algorithm in wwwurl.pl (particularly relating
to the parsing of relative URLs) to coincide with the IETF standards
discussion. This fixed several potential (but unlikely) bugs and also
got rid of any "URL:" prefix parsing [finally!].
Fixed parsing in wwwhtml.pl of href's that had a new-line after the
quote mark, causing an extra space to precede the extracted URL,
which in turn created a black hole. Also added code to extract and change
the base URL if there exists a <BASE href="..."> element.
Updated the wording in Artistic.txt to represent a Perl API rather than
a compiler written in C (as is the Perl distribution).
Version 0.20 July 20, 1994
Added the wwwbot.pl library and testbot program (by Brooks Cutter)
for implementing the robot exclusion protocol.
Added the testlinks program for yet another example of how useful
programs can be easily implemented on top of libwww-perl -- it also
tests just about every aspect of the request libraries.
Added &www'set_def_header() and check_defaults() so that protocol
header defaults (such as the HTTP From: header) can be set within
the library and other default request headers can be set
once by the client and effect all requests (e.g. User-Agent).
Fixed the source of an annoying warning from "perl -w" in wwwhttp.pl.
Moved some existing code in wwwmime.pl into a separate function
set_content() which can set the "content-type" header for any given
file extension.
Added &wwwurl'get_site() for extracting the site name (server:port)
from a given URL.
Updated the get program to make use of the new interface changes.
Changed the eval of &wwwscheme'request to a simpler &$routine call
after a suggestion from Brooks.
Fixed a bug in &wwwhtml'extract_links() which was causing a segmentation
fault when a completely <element>-free file (i.e. a text file) was
mistakenly extracted.
Version 0.12 July 8, 1994
Placed everything under RCS version control and included repository.
Added www'stat (from Brooks Cutter) for doing stat-like calls on a URL.
Added message field to wwwerror'onrequest so that error-specific
messages (e.g. $@ and $!) can be included in the canned HTML output.
Added symbolic names for all response code numbers.
Reassigned 000 Timed Out error to response code 603.
Added 602 Connection Failed response code.
Vastly improved the error-handling for wwwhttp'request().
Now escapes the URL entries generated by wwwfile'dirlist().
Removed buggy attempt to delete comments at start of wwwhtml'extract_links.
Updated META parsing in wwwhtml to reflect HTML 2.0 proposed spec.
Moved require of sys/socket.ph outside of wwwhttp package declaration
due to a bug in perl4 found by Martijn Koster.
Added many checks to be sure environment variables are defined before
trying to use them in wwwmime, wwwurl, get, and testdates (Martijn Koster).
Fixed bug that occurred when parsing URLs with an empty path.
Replaced complicated wwwurl'unescape loop with a simple substitute
(from Steven E. Brenner via Brooks Cutter).
Added wwwurl'escape() to %hex escape URL segments (from Brooks Cutter).
Added testescapes program for testing wwwurl'escape and unescape.
Version 0.11 June 17, 1994
Changed environment variable LIBWWW-PERL to LIBWWW_PERL because
some systems can't handle the dash (Charlie Stross).
Fixed bug in "get" that caused full pathname to be used as the method
(Martijn Koster).
Fixed handling of perverse relative URLs (e.g. ../../) in wwwurl'absolute.
Version 0.10 June 13, 1994
First public version. libwww-perl was developed by Roy Fielding
from the core of MOMspider, a program intended to assist multi-owner
maintenance of distributed hypertext infostructures. It was expanded
to a general-purpose library after some encouragement from
Oscar Nierstrasz and Martijn Koster during the First International
Conference on the World-Wide Web (WWW94).