Re: Proxy support

[Josselin Mouette <joss debian org>]

Le mardi 19 octobre 2010 à 08:54 -0400, Dan Winship a écrit :
> We're in the process of pushing proxy support down into glib. As of
> 2.26, glib has basic proxy support, via an extension point which is
> implemented by the glib-networking module, which uses libproxy in
> roughly the same way libsoup does. (As of GNOME 2.32, libsoup hasn't
> been rewritten to fully use GProxyResolver rather than libproxy directly
> though.)
> 
> However, glib could also make use of an extension point to allow libsoup
> to implement the PAC bits of proxy lookup.

I think that’s definitely needed. We don’t need yet another crappy HTTP
implementation.

> > A correct implementation would lie in libsoup-gnome itself and:
> >       * directly read configuration settings using GConf (or now
> >         GSettings),
> 
> FTR, libproxy used to read directly from GConf, but this caused crashes
> when it was used from multithreaded programs, because libgconf isn't
> thread-safe. It is possible to work around this, but it sucks (see
> soup-proxy-resolver-gnome.c). GSettings should not have that problem though.

OK, I understand better the reason. I suppose everything will be in
GSettings at the time of 3.0, so this shouldn’t be a problem.

> >       * provide an extension point for parsing the JS in proxy.pac
> >         files,
> >       * ship such an extension along with libwebkit.
> 
> Shipping extension points with non-GNOME modules is tricky, because it
> potentially requires the external module to release in sync with the
> GNOME release. Of course, WebKitGTK already pretty much does. (But
> there's no way that would work for a mozjs-based extension, which I
> think would still be desired, since in GNOME 3 the core desktop will
> require mozjs.)

Another option is to do like GTK+ does for tracker/beagle, and dlopen
the appropriate libraries, but it requires to keep a lot of
compatibility code whenever the soname changes.

> > What do you think? Are there any ongoing evolutions of libsoup to
> > improve this situation?
> 
> I definitely agree that libproxy has major issues, and I'd be happy to
> see us drop it as well (or to see it get fixed). But I'm not currently
> working on that and I don't know of anyone else who is either.

OK. I might have time to look at it in a few months, then. If I
understand correctly all should be in glib-networking at that time,
right?

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