[Surfraw-devel] Patch: re woffle (WWWoffle)

Geoff Maciolek geoff.maciolek at gmail.com
Wed Aug 30 14:51:35 UTC 2017


Short version: the (ancient) elvi "woffle" is actually named
incorrectly in the docs - it's "WWWoffle." I've attached a patch to
fix this (without touching the changelogs that reference it, etc).
This only changes the docs / description, *not* the elvi filename,
etc, soas to not break anyone's workflow.  I'd also be happy to do
this via git, see below.

Long version:

Hey folks!  I imagine I'm not the first person to wonder this...

After falling in love with surfraw, I checked out the various elvi
options, and came upon "woffle."  spent an embarrassing amount of time
scratching my head / confused, while reading the man pages / readme,
asking myself"What on earth is WOFFLE?" Simple google searches were
surprisingly ineffective.

Eventually, after seeing that 'htdig' was in the URL path, and seeing
a 10 year old entry in the debian changelog referencing "woffle 2.9a"
I managed to figure out what this is all about, and why I was having
trouble finding it.

It's not "woffle," it's "WWWoffle!" WWWoffle is an HTTP proxy designed
for people with intermittent internet connections.  (And, it appears
that WWWoffle uses the "htdig" tool to perform the actual search.
(htdig also not having been updated in 11 years).

Anyway, if you're curious about WWWoffle:
https://www.gedanken.org.uk/software/wwwoffle/README - it's actually
pretty great, from what I can see.

Anyway, as I mentioned above, I've attached a patch to fix the naming
in the docs, without changing the command name or such. Maybe someone
in the future won't waste ~2 hours as I just did trying to figure out
what woffle is. (:

I applied this locally via git, and would be happy to "push" this and
so be forever immoratalized in the git history, but I don't know
what's actually involved in that. (I only started using distributed
version control *after* the advent of github, and I'm not sure what
folks are using for access control on independent projects like this,
etc).

Thanks for the time & attention!

--Geoff Maciolek
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