Dear lazy programmers, I was surprised to discover that `cabal-install' -- a popular utility for installing Hackage packages -- cannot work with HTTP proxies. Despite all the necessary code linked in.
`cabal update' command returns HTTP 407 (Proxy Authentication Required)
error. The problem is explained below and patches follow.
* * *
Our office LAN has an HTTP proxy server with authorization.
And my shell environment has a variable like
http_proxy='http://user:passw...@proxyhost:proxyport/'
tcpdump-ing shows that `cabal update' sends invalid credentials in
HTTP "CONNECT" request. The proper string would be "user:password"
(base64-encoded) while `cabal' sends "user:password@". There's no
surprise proxy server denies connection!
I've traced the problem down to `userinfo' function, defined in
network-2.2.0.1/Network/URI.hs:451:
> -- RFC3986, section 3.2.1
>
> userinfo :: URIParser String
> userinfo =
> do { uu <- many (uchar ";:&=+$,")
> ; char '@'
> ; return (concat uu ++"@")
> }
Let us see section 3.2 of RFC3986:
> authority = [ userinfo "@" ] host [ ":" port ]
> [...
> ...] The user information, if present, is followed by a
> commercial at-sign ("@") that delimits it from the host.
There is no reason for "@" character to be a part of `userinfo'
expression.
* * *
So, the Right Way(TM) to make cabal-install go through proxies is
fixing `userinfo' function of `network' package (see the
`network-2.2.0.1.patch'). Until then, we should have a workaround in
`cabal-install' (cabal-install-0.6.0.patch). I do.
Happy hacking!
--
vvv
network-2.2.0.1.patch
Description: Binary data
cabal-install-0.6.0.patch
Description: Binary data
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