[Telepathy] Stage of proxy support

[Felipe Contreras]

On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 2:08 AM, Sjoerd Simons
<sjoerd.simons at collabora.co.uk> wrote:
> On Tue, May 04, 2010 at 01:53:38AM +0300, Felipe Contreras wrote:
>> What is not covered is: hey, I have to use a proxy for
>> messenger.hotmail.com, and also for talk.google.com, unless I'm
>> connecting through port 443, and jabber.company.com without any proxy.
>>
>> The easiest way to cover all of the above is to actually give the user
>> the option to configure each account manually. As I said, the
>> automatic proxy stuff is nice, but nobody is using it nowadays,
>
> The more decent networks i've seen give you a nice proxy configuation file,
> which libproxy can use to work out all those things and more.. If you need more
> manual configuration then that your network is just hostile to its own users
> and maybe you should do something about that instead (pitchforks spring to mind
> as a useful tool here)

That's laughable. I have never seen a nice proxy configuration file, I
have never seen an application other than the browser using them, and
fixing company-wide configurations is something rather impossible.

Imagine this situation if you can; a new team develops in Nokia
(Meego) and setups up it's internal jabber server;
talk.meego.nokia.com. Now, do you seriously believe that Nokia IT
would change the company configuration for your team's server only for
one client (Empathy) that actually supports that?

In my experience, big company IT services are hostile to their users,
that's expected. What is not expected is our software to be that way.

>> and most people would rather configure each account manually than write their
>> own javascript code configuration thingy.
>
> most people don't know what a proxy is, neither do they (or should they
> have to) care

They learn when they join a big company/institution...

A: Dude, I can't access the Internets!.
B: Ah, you need to configure a proxy... here.

IOW; they learn because they have to. And most places with proxies
have detailed instructions to configure IM clients to access the
different networks. Google 'pidgin proxy' and you'll see 3 million
hits.

> That said, i don't mind having a UI for hardcore
> i-know-better-then-my-admin-and-i-hate-live-anyway proxy settings UI, but it
> shouldn't be in Empathy nor should we have to re-implement it in every CM. This
> again is something libproxy and the tools around it could provide for you in
> one central place (which we could link to from the empathy settings).

Right, why add two fields in the configuration when you can redesign
the way proxies work in GNOME. I have been interested on this since
2005 and it has not happened yet. Also, what would happen to devices
like the future Meego? Do you rely on somebody writing a configuration
UI in QT for libproxy?

Per-account configurations is simple, easy, and that's what everybody
is doing. We could have full telepathy-haze proxy support Right Now.

Maybe in 2015 I'll be able to actually use Empathy.

P.S. I'm attaching an example proxy.pac which is basically the one
from Nokia, but obscured (obviously no IM stuff on sight).

-- 
Felipe Contreras
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: proxy.pac
Type: application/octet-stream
Size: 6778 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/telepathy/attachments/20100504/b62243cd/attachment.obj>