Fixing proxy support in Fedora (was Re: Orphaning few packages)

[David Woodhouse]

On Wed, 2013-06-05 at 12:08 +0800, Christopher Meng wrote:
> libproxy taken.

I'm also very interested in libproxy. Would you mind if I comaintain it?

I've been meaning to deal with proxy configuration in Fedora for a
while. For those who use an environment where *all* external access has
to be through proxies, Fedora is just horrid to use. The out-of-the-box
behaviour for *every* HTTP client application is fairly much broken, and
you have to manually configure *each* of them to make them work.
Repeatedly, each time you enter or leave that horrid proxy-requiring
environment.

Libproxy, or something like it, is the solution to this. What we really
need to happen is:

 - NetworkManager picks up proxy information (from DHCP, VPN server,
   autoproxy or explicit configuration for the connection in use)

 - *EVERY* application just asks "what proxy should I use for this
   URL" by default, unless it's explicitly configured otherwise.

And thus, in one fell swoop, the problem is solved.

In fact the original libproxy is fairly horrid. It's an overcomplex C++
monstrosity which runs the full JS interpreter in the context of *every*
application which ever needs to check if it needs to use a proxy.

There's a much saner, ABI-compatible, replacement in PacRunner, which
has a dæmon which sits on DBus and answers questions. Its
"libproxy.so.1" replacement is just a trivial DBus client, and that's a
much better way of doing things. I'll be putting in a review request for
pacrunner shortly.

In the meantime, though, there's nothing to stop us continuing the
process of fixing all applications and http libraries to use libproxy.so
by default. We've done some, and there's more to be done. I'm half
tempted to submit it as a Feature for F20.

Is anyone else interested in getting this fixed?

-- 
dwmw2
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/x-pkcs7-signature
Size: 5745 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/attachments/20130606/6c5df4ca/attachment.bin>