Re: global proxy settings

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs noisehavoc org>]

On 21Dec2001 03:15AM (-0500), Alex Graveley wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Fri, 2001-12-21 at 01:19, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> > The password should not be stored in GConf. The username, maybe, as a
> > convenience. The user should get promted for the proxy password as
> > needed (ideally only once per app or once per session). 
> 
> What we don't want is this stuck in the applications.  We would be no
> better off than we are now.

gnome-vfs supports proxy authentication just like regular http
authentication, by making a callback to the app, allowing the
application to prompt the user however it wants (since apps may want
different dialogs, text-based apps may want to prompt on the
command-line, etc). This works pretty well for the purposes of
nautilus, which has only a tiny smattering of code to pop up the
dialog. Everything else is transparent to the app.

I think despite what you say, this leaves us better off than before,
when proxy and http auth were totally unsupported.
 
> Does GConf have any way to call code or activate a moniker when a key
> read happens?  Other than that I can't see a clean way to implement this
> without a custom library.

I think calling back to the application to display a dialog is just
fine. We could even provide some stock dialog code for this somewhere.

Why do you think this approach would be bad? I mean, http auth is
usually supported this way, and I imagine Camel handles authentication
for mail in this manner as well.
 
> > 
> > These sound fine to me (although gnome-vfs does not support them yet).
> 
> Check out soup/src/libsoup/soup-socks.c for code to do this.

I must admit that supporting SOCKS proxies is not the number one
priority for gnome-vfs. I would love to see code for this contributed,
but I doubt the current most active contributors will have time to.
 
 - Maciej