A sole, standard proxy library for Fedora

[Philip Prindeville]

Arthur Pemberton wrote:

>On 5/27/06, Aurelien Bompard <gauret at free.fr> wrote:
>  
>
>> How about having a file in /etc/profile.d, say proxy.sh and proxy.csh
>> (yeah,
>>
>>that's two, well, you get the point) containing this:
>># Set your proxy using the following variables:
>># http_proxy=http://your.proxy.server:8080
>># ftp_proxy=http://your.proxy.server:8080
>># If you need authentication, use:
>># http_proxy=http://username:password@your.proxy.server:8080
>>
>>At least that would save the Googling (and it's easy to do).
>>
>>Then, we could make a system-config-proxy which would set this file, and set
>>the proxy in GNOME, KDE and firefox while it's at it.
>>Or we could fix the GNOME setting app and Kcontrol to setup environment
>>variables in /etc/profile.d/proxy.{sh,csh}. I'm not sure upstream would
>>accept setting the proxy in Firefox too though, so we might need a
>>system-config-proxy in the end.
>>
>>Yes, this is suboptimal compared to using a single libproxy.so to rule them
>>all, but will big cross-platform apps like firefox support it ?
>>
>>
>>Aurélien
>>--
>>http://aurelien.bompard.org  ~~~~  Jabber : abompard at jabber.fr
>>The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that it's all learned.
>>
>>    
>>
>
>I have tried the above approach manually. It works better on paper
>than in practice. Especially considering the numerous other
>applications that require similiar configurations. But that is one
>solution.
>
>  
>

Well, you're missing a few crucial things...  Other than the fact that
existing applications (and even X or login sessions) have to be restarted
to accommodate this...  It also doesn't allow you to layer any sort of
policy onto the proxy selection on a per-connection basis.

I might have rules that say, "If it's to any of these subnets, or to
internal
Intranet servers, then don't go through our proxies... everything else goes
through the proxy."

You can't do that with the environment variable hack.  It doesn't even
come close.

The library, on the other hand, you can reconfigure without restarting
applications or sessions, and you can make the proxy selection policy
be arbitrarily complex.

-Philip