Re: Online Desktop and GNOME 2.22

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Mon, 2007-11-26 at 10:05 -0500, Dan Winship wrote:
> Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > I do think libsoup, gnome-vfs, neon, and curl are all bad answers 
> > long-term for apps that want to use web APIs or download an icon. The 
> > right answer will address among other things how to share cookies and 
> > proxy settings and cache with the browser.
> 
> Can you check out http://live.gnome.org/LibSoup/DesktopWideHttp and see 
> if there's anything missing?
> 
>  > And IMO should just be HTTP, not SOAP or DAV. So this is a good
>  > problem for someone to try to solve.
> 
> So, I'm not sure if you're being misled by libsoup's name (and 
> heritage), but it IS just HTTP. (The SOAP support was ripped out for 
> version 2.0, and while there was a little bit of soap stuff added back 
> later, it's totally peripheral.) While I agree that no existing HTTP 
> library does all of the integration you discuss (even using mozilla's 
> HTTP layer is no good because it still can't *share* all the data with 
> Firefox), it seems like it would make a lot more sense to take a working 
> HTTP library and build on that, rather than writing a new one from 
> scratch. (Unless you're thinking that the best solution is to proxy all 
> HTTP calls to Firefox over D-Bus or something?)

The ones we would care about for Totem and other media players would be
passwords and cookies (and to a lesser extent certificates in a few
cases). The problem is that we usually use gnome-vfs to access HTTP
resources, and moving to gio/gvfs would either need an HTTP module
there, or a library that offers similar features.