On Thu, 20 Dec 2007, Alex Panait wrote:

Just again, don't take me wrong on this. I really like the concept and idea of
this new library.

> Currently, libcurl can use proxies that are manually passed into libcurl via
> the api. This should not change. However, if no option is passed, libcurl
> falls back to detecting the environment variable. Instead of this behavior,
> fall back onto libproxy. libproxy can use environment variables, so no
> compatibility is lost.

Right, if libproxy supports the same variables the same way, no current
functionality would be lost...

> However, you gain the ability to read configuration from GNOME or KDE (Mac &
> Windows soon to come) and to perform autodetection and adjust to changing
> network topology.

But I would really not hit application developers with this in their heads.
libcurl would all of a sudden scan around the system to figure out proxy
details (and in the case it is a remote PAC, it would even have to actually
fetch a remote file), details that it would need to search for every time you
create/init a new libcurl handle to make a new request - just another reason
it makes sense to do this outside of libcurl.

If we would support this library within libcurl, I would still want an option
that explicitly asks libcurl to attempt to autodetect a proxy to use, so that
existing apps won't break or start behaving funnily. Then also, if there are
more than one proxy returned from libproxy, won't the app author want the
ability to perhaps pick the one sh/she prefers most? That too would require
further API fluff to get added to libcurl.

> It seems more reasonable to make such a change at the root of the dependency
> tree, rather than along the branches. Aside from a couple of hours of coding
> there is nothing to lose and a lot to gain.

I'm voicing my scepticism, although of course some people would call me old
and grumpy... I'm all ears for further input from others on this topic.

BTW, there aren't any docs for the libproxy API and its configure didn't
finish okey on my box (and I found no docs describing prerequisites etc). I'd
say it it's not release-material just yet...

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