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

[David Woodhouse]

On Thu, 2013-06-06 at 12:35 +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 06, 2013 at 11:55:08AM +0100, David Woodhouse wrote:
> >  - *EVERY* application just asks "what proxy should I use for this
> >    URL" by default, unless it's explicitly configured otherwise.
> 
> I feel your pain, but making every application depend on an
> "overcomplex" C++ Javascript interpreter or (even worse) a dbus
> connection is going to be very error prone.  Does this include every
> time I run 'wget'?

Define "depend on".

The failure mode is just to fall back to not using a proxy. So if it
can't talk to the pacrunner service on DBus, or even if DBus is
completely inaccessible, you'll just end up using no proxy. Which is
often fine.

> So fine to have it, but make it optional for those that don't need it,
> which is almost everyone.

Yes, it should absolutely be optional. Any *manual* configuration of
proxies (including a "do not use a proxy" directive) would override the
default behaviour.

But ideally you should never *need* to disable it.

The *existing* libproxy will actually go off and look in DNS for
autoproxy.$DOMAIN and other things when it's initialised... each time
you run wget. That would suck. But with pacrunner you shouldn't even
*notice* if it's doing a DBus call and getting a "no proxy" response.

My primary goal it to make it *invisible* for those that don't need it. 

And then it doesn't *matter* about making it optional. Although we'll do
that too, of course.

I'll probably end up doing alternatives for libproxy.so.1, to handle the
transition to pacrunner's version. (Either that or just kill the old
libproxy completely, perhaps).

But once I'm *thinking* about alternatives, it occurs to me that I could
just provide a libproxy-null alternative which provides libproxy.so.1
that always does *nothing*. If people *really* needed that. But if they
do, then I've done something else wrong.

-- 
dwmw2
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