Re: Online Desktop and GNOME 2.22

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Hi,

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. 

To be clear, I wasn't trying to say here that none of these could be 
made a good answer, just that they aren't now due to the 
browser-state-sharing issue (or e.g. gnome-vfs deprecation, etc.). I 
would not say writing an http lib from scratch makes sense. The main 
other approach I was thinking of was to in some way use the Firefox http 
implementation, either via a dbus daemon or just via a shared library. 
Alex had some thoughts along those lines too.

> Can you check out http://live.gnome.org/LibSoup/DesktopWideHttp and see 
> if there's anything missing?

It looks pretty good to me though I am not an expert. I think from what 
you wrote it's pretty clear that modifying Firefox itself is a required 
part of a good solution.

Some offhand thoughts that may suck:

 - making the codepath different depending on whether Firefox is running
   sounds like a direction that would have user-visible weird effects
   and also make app authors uncomfortable

 - it seems inevitable that both gnome-http-lib and Firefox would need
   to rely on some type of common "repository" of cookies, etc. and that
   this repo would be managed by some type of daemon that handled
   locking and change-notification; said daemon would need to be able
   to run sans Firefox, and would need to handle changes to the repo,
   not be read-only.

 - though it never pays to block on a committee, I would say key
   people to get "sign off" from (or at least keep informed) would
   be Alex so we know the solution works for gvfs, and the Mozilla
   team, so we know they will take the patches to Firefox and
   be OK with the way it's done

 - the Mozilla team might be interested in this problem on Windows
   also, since right now using the Windows HTTP stuff shares state
   with IE, but I'm guessing apps that rely on this get hosed when
   people use Firefox. So maybe Mozilla would like to provide an
   HTTP lib on Windows that shares state with Firefox, or something.
   No idea though.

Havoc