Re: [gnome-love] Gnome goal proposal : proxy support

[Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org>]

On Tue, 2008-10-28 at 15:58 +0100, Lionel Dricot wrote:
> Hello,
>
> At work, I'm stuck behind a proxy with a password. I then discovered
> that a lot of application are not capable of handling a connection
> with a proxy. Others require a specific configuration while the proxy
> configuration is already available by Gnome. Last but not least, some
> applications use the Gnome proxy preferences but forget to handle
> proxy exceptions or handle proxy correctly only if no password is
> required.
>
>
> The idea of my Gnome Goal proposal would be to have perfect and
> consistent proxy support in the whole Gnome desktop, which is a great
> asset in the corporate world.
>
> To comply, applications should :
>
> 1) Connect seamlessly to the Internet if the proxy is configured in
> the gnome proxy settings (manually configured or with a pac file).
>
> 2) Have no proxy/network preferences or, if really needed, an option
> enabled by default "Use gnome/system settings"  (The only reason would
> be to allow application to work without Gnome. I cannot imagine why
> the hell network should be a per-application setting)
>
> 3) Connect seamlessly to the exceptions of the proxy (typical usage :
> intranet website)
>
> 4) If the proxy requires a password *and* the password is not set in
> the gnome-proxy-settings, then ask for it.
>
> 5) If the password is already in the gnome proxy settings, don't ask
> for it (unlike Epiphany).
>
>
> In order to achieve this, we could make an howto on how to set a local
> proxy on your computer and, for a week or two, we will ask all Gnome
> developpers to eat their own dog food and only connect through their
> local proxy. I'm sure it will reveal a lot of eatches to scratch !
>
>
> Do you believe it worth a Gnome Goal ? Or do you think that individual
> bug reports are enough for that. ?
it is indeed a very nice goal, but if every app using the network needs
to do all this, the situation is going to continue as it is today :-) So
it would be great if there was an API for every app to use, which would
just use/not use the proxy settings and authenticate if needed, all done
"automagically" behind the scenes.

> BTW, I'm a strong proponent of location-based proxies (thus having
> proxy configuration related to the connection used in Network-Manager
> or, better, having the proxy configuration directly built in N-M) but
> I'm not sure that this request fit into this goal.
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=477040
> https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-system-tools/+bug/173256
I also think NM is the place to have this, but not all distros use it
AFAIK, so we can't really rely on that. But yes, it would make much more
sense to have all the proxy config related to the current NM
connection. 
-- 
Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org>