Package: lynx-cur Version: 2.8.9dev1-2+deb8u1 Severity: important Lynx has developed a habit of finding it difficult to load the same web page twice in one session, for pages in some websites but not others. The envelope of this bug is a bit tricky.
As far as I can see, within any particular Lynx session this bug affects a fixed set of websites: a site that is affected is affected for the whole session, and a site that does not exhibit the problem won't come to exhibit it later in the session. A "website" for this purpose is the combination of scheme prefix and authority part of a URL. All paths within a website are affected together. I have not been able to determine whether different scheme/authority combinations that involve the same hostname can be affected distinct from each other, but ones involving different hostnames are definitely distinct. The websites that I have found affected so far are only HTTPS ones. Which websites are affected is mostly consistent between Lynx sessions. For the past few weeks I have found that <https://en.wikipedia.org> is affected in all my Lynx sessions. Recently <https://www.theguardian.com> has come to be affected in most sessions, but not entirely consistently. Most websites remain unaffected. I have no idea what distinguishes the affected websites from unaffected ones. Where the bug is in effect, the first loading of any page from an affected website works normally, but then any second or subsequent attempt to load the same page shortly thereafter fails. This happens for almost any means of invoking a page load: following a link from another page, typing in the URL manually, or following a link from the browser's "visited links" page. But page loading succeeds if invoked by following a link from the browser's "history" page, by using the "u" command to pop the history stack, or by using the ^R command to reload the current page. Where page loading fails due to this bug, there is activity in the status line that seems to reflect a network request, but then the activity ends and the status line returns to normal without changing page, as if the request to load the affected page had never been made. The inability to load a page twice applies separately to each page in the affected website. Loading a different page (with different URL) works. Many pages from the same website may be loaded in sequence. But then attempting to load the same pages again fails: each previously-loaded page cannot be loaded again. Such failing page loads can be arbitrarily interleaved with successful first-time page loads. However, an attempted repeated page load may succeed if enough activity has taken place since the first (successful) load of that page. "Enough activity" seems to be constituted by successful loads of sufficiently many other pages. (Perhaps a caching issue?) Repeatedly attempting to load a failing page, with no other activity between attempts, doesn't make it succeed. After a successful repeated page load, further attempts to load the same page again go back to failing. -zefram
