Re: [announce] gnome-proxy

[Nathaniel McCallum <nathaniel natemccallum com>]

On Thu, 2007-01-18 at 13:54 +0100, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-01-18 at 07:37 -0500, Nathaniel McCallum wrote:
> 
> > For the "no proxy configured" or the "manual proxy configured" cases, we
> > would want the app to cache the results.  getProxy() could return a
> > boolean "cacheable" field.  If set to true, the app will not call
> > getProxy() again until a "ProxySettingsChanged" signal is emitted. In
> > that case, WPAD/PAC would always return cacheable == false and
> > manual/none would always return cacheable == true.
> > 
> > A lot of this comes from the fact that PAC/WPAD are completely and utter
> > crack and, while I would love to just ignore them, they are *widely*
> > deployed.
> > 
> > Thoughts?
> 
> Cacheable is not good enough i think. I think we could try to return as
> much information we can about the cacheability. Something like "Cache
> this value for this uri", "Cache this value for this server", "Cache
> this value for all http requests", etc. We could also have a signal you
> could listen to to invalidate the cache (for when we change network, or
> when the proxy settings change). 
> 
> I don't know exactly what kind of info we can figure out, but at the
> very least we should be able to handle the cases you mention above.

direct/none == "always cache"
manual      == "cache for this protocol" (ie. http/https/ftp)
PAC/WPAD    == "never cache"

The reason you never cache for PACs is that they are sometimes used for
load balancing, timed access (ie. 8-5), etc. Yes, horrible I know.

I'm down with a cacheability flag though.

Nathaniel