GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 123900
gnomevfs doesn't honor automatic proxy configuration
Last modified: 2008-09-06 18:54:21 UTC
Switch to the automatic proxy configuration in the proxy configuration dialog, enter some valid url to a valid proxy.pac and then switch to nautilus and enter an URL. You'll get an error message stating that something is wrong with your proxy settings.
This isn't really a nautilus bug but the proxy stuff is handled in gnome-vfs.
*** Bug 133634 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
What proxy are you using to test this with?
I confirm gnomevfs doesn't honor the autoconfig proxy setting at all. To reproduce this, use for example something like http://www.ram.rwth-aachen.de/cgi-bin/autoconf as a "proxy.pac" is autoconfig script. You should see that galeon / epiphany etc. fail on all URL, say http://www.gnome.org, because they honor the proxy settings (they don't use gnomevfs for this), but gnomevfs-info can still access the page (and it shouldn't), because it doesn't honor the proxy settings. I did a network trace to be sure that gnomevfs doesn't try to contact the proxy at all (ie. this is not a fallback behavior). Configuring a proxy manually seems to work with gnomevfs though. This is Debian bug <http://bugs.debian.org/289357> and happens in gnomevfs 2.8.3 (Debian's 2.8.3-7).
Automatic proxy configuration requires javascript evaluation. I think this won't get fixed anytime soon. We would have to find a small js library or sth. I will mark this as Priority low and Severity minor.
Can't do != unimportant- WONTFIX it or leave it high priority. Given that we ship mozilla as part of the platform here, can we pass it the information and get a response back somehow? Can we ask the epiphany guys about this?
Mozilla isn't split in smaller parts such as "libmozjs" in Debian right now -- but I presume it could be split that way. I'll tag Debian's bug as wontfix for now, but it's a real usability problem for people behind proxies. Bye,
The mozilla javascript engine ('spidermonkey') is embeddable in C programs, see http://www.mozilla.org/js/spidermonkey/ -- although I don't know if you can just use mozilla's jslib or have to build another copy of it.
Luis, well I am not so sure if this is really that high priority (it was marked as normal priority for more than 1 year) and I am totally aware of "Can't do != unimportant". I tried to fix that issue while I was re-writing the http module for 2.8 but its really hard to do. So this is definitively a WONTFIX for this release and most likely for the next few releases if it get fixed at all. I thimk the rest of the gome-vfs team agrees here that dragging in a dependency of the mozilla js engine to gnome-vfs is to bug to fix this *imho* not so important issue. Maybe we sure really close it as a WONTFIX - alex, teuf?
Am I on drugs? "dragging in a dependency of the mozilla js engine to gnome-vfs is to bug to fix this *imho* not so important issue." should read as: "that it is not worth to drag in a dependency of the mozilla js engine to gnome-vfs only to fix this *ihmo* not so important bug" Sorry for the spam, it's 1:23 am here.
<alex> a js engine in gnome-vfs sounds totally wrong <alex> otoh, a lot of people use automatic proxies... <alex> I'm not sure they do with nautilus though... <alex> or gnome-vfs in general <alex> I'd say WONTFIX <alex> I don't see a sane fix to it So I'll finally mark this as a WONTIFX.
I don't mind when gnome-vfs cannot use proxy.pac, though it would make things easier. But then maybe some other approach to fix this should be chosen, because it is currently just confusing. So I'd say: as gnome-vfs and thus all gnome applications (except the browsers epiphany, galeon - any more?) cannot handle proxy.pac, this setting shouldn't be in the system dialog to setup the proxy. The browsers could still allow the user to choose to either use the system settings or own settings and allow to set the proxy.pac there.
It's difficult to remove the setting in the GNOME preferences since all brothers require it right now. A warning in the release notes, in the known bugs, or in the UI itself might make it into 2.10 though.
This is a clear WONTFIX from gnome-vfs so I am moving this to control-center since the reporter reopened the bug.
Did I reopen this accidentaly? Anyway, I'm okay for closing this as wontfix, I just suggested some things to do to let other people know of the limitation.
Hmm, should this be a WONTFIX or not?
Moving back to gnome-vfs, since: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2006-October/msg00071.html allows use not to have a Javascript interpreter in gnome-vfs itself. However, this would require using D-Bus from within a method module, which might not be the best thing to do. Here's one of the possibilities: 1/ - Modify http-proxy.c to handle "automatic" configuration URLs, by calling the D-Bus method (possibly a compile-time option to avoid the dbus dep?) - Make FTP method use that same proxy code (nobody cares about the cdda one) or 2/ - Have the proxy-using methods live inside the daemon with a simple callback mechanism to ask what the proxy is for that particular host (similar to the gnome_vfs_get_is_daemon() case in gnome_vfs_module_callback_invoke), implement the proxy work there. or 3/ - el crapola implementation, magic button in the network proxy pushes all the configuration from the website/PAC file to GConf. It sucks, and doesn't handle multiple proxies or changing locations. I like option 2 and can look into implementing it some time soon. Here are some links with example PAC files: http://nscsysop.hypermart.net/proxypac.html WPAD (at least the DNS/Web server version should be easy to implement, I filed bug 368423 against NM for the DHCP option): http://nscsysop.hypermart.net/setproxy.html
I prefer option 1. Moving http and ftp to the daemon is destabilizing. For instance, I don't think all callbacks used by it are correctly proxied atm. And anyway, daemon calls are dbus calls too, so have similar issues as direct dbus calls. Dbus deps are not a problem, we already have one for the daemon.
More docs: http://wp.netscape.com/eng/mozilla/2.0/relnotes/demo/proxy-live.html
gnome-vfs has been deprecated and superseded by gio/gvfs since GNOME 2.22, hence mass-closing many of the gnome-vfs requests/bug reports. This means that gnome-vfs is NOT actively maintained anymore, however patches are still welcome. If your reported issue is still valid for gio/gvfs, please feel free to file a bug report against glib/gio or gvfs. @Bugzilla mail recipients: query for gnome-vfs-mass-close to get rid of this notification noise all together. General further information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GVFS Reasons behind this decision are listed at http://www.mail-archive.com/gnome-vfs-list@gnome.org/msg00899.html