On Sun, Dec 21, 2008 at 6:05 PM, Gwern Branwen <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sun, Dec 21, 2008 at 8:00 AM, Eric Kow wrote: >> I remember Justin Bailey once submitted a patch to switch completely to >> HTTP and I very enthusiastically supported it, only to be stilled by >> wiser voices. Then one year later, I moved to the UK where all academic >> institutions are apparently behind a proxy server, and where HTTP >> basically just broke for me. Sure learned my lesson there! > > Indeed. Features can often seem unnecessary - until you need them. On > the plus side, I've seen grumbling about cabal-install not handling > proxies, which may motivate HTTP support.
Actually cabal-install handle proxies, at least the non-authenticated ones, pretty well, as does the HTTP library. The "real" problem are "Negotiate" proxies, the ones used in Windows networks, that use a Kerberos-based protocol that requires a strict interaction with operating system to work. Now, provided that there're a lot of meta-proxies that converts NTLM/Negotiate proxies to standard unauthenticated proxies (like ntlmproxy), and that they works beautifully with darcs (I know because I use them :-) ), I believe that we should not make a priority supporting them. Their support is a bit clunky with curl too, by the way. This leaves two cases to handle: A) Unauthenticated proxies B) BASIC-authenticated proxies HTTP can handle A pretty well, and I'm not sure that it can't handle B. Actually we don't support proxies with HTTP library because we got scared of the files used in cabal to support them :). Actually that is too much for us: if we just need to read proxy parameters from HTTP_PROXY environment variable half of that file is useless (it is used to read proxy informations from Windows register too, that is pretty cool but not a priority in my opinion). So... I'll try to put together a patch to make both HTTP 4000 and HTTP proxy support work in these holidays, so we can do some "real" performance tests. I would LOVE to slowly see HTTP library become a viable choice for darcs, as the curl dependency (and its meta-dependencies) hurts our multi-platform efforts, and it's the last one standing now that the libz ones is slowly fading away. Salvatore _______________________________________________ darcs-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
