Re: libproxy as external dependency

[Dan Winship <danw gnome org>]

Felipe Contreras wrote:
> There's also:
> 4. Do the actual proxified communication
> 
> Who is supposed to add the SOCKS 4/5 headers and HTTP proxy stuff? I
> don't think libsoup (an HTTP library) is supposed to do that, since
> other protocols will need to do the same (IRC, FTP, etc).

SOCKS will presumably be handled by the gio-based network layer, once
that exists. Presumably the case of "(ab)use an HTTP proxy to connect to
a non-HTTP protocol" could be added there as well.

If we're going to have an API that creates network connections, it
should be a nice, glib-ish API, and libproxy isn't going to provide
that, because it's not a glib-based library. It's desktop-agnostic by
design.

> The current proposal sounds like a libproxy-conf, not libproxy.

Yes, that's exactly right. The problem libproxy solves is NOT "help apps
connect to proxies". It's "let apps know what proxies they are supposed
to connect to", because that seems to be where most of the problems are.
(Lots of apps already have support for using a proxy, they just don't
have any support for using *the same proxy you already configured
somewhere else*.)

Making SOCKS work everywhere in GNOME is a bigger problem, which is
explicitly outside libproxy's scope.

And it's not a "proposal", it's working code.

-- Dan