From: Chad Fowler <chadfowler@...>
Date: 2004-05-05T23:51:01+09:00
Subject: Re: RubyGem behind an authenticating proxy

On Wed, 5 May 2004 19:45:16 +0900, Dick Davies
<rasputnik@hellooperator.net> wrote:
> 
> * Mehr, Assaph (Assaph) <assaph@avaya.com> [0526 00:26]:
> > > I can't offer any real help; I can only say that RubyGems' proxy
> > > handling is completely outsourced to 'open-uri'.  If you can
> > > demonstrate a simple app using just that, in which your particular
> > > proxy works, it would help.
> >
> > Why aren't you using 'net/http'?
> 
> Probably because it doesn't support ftp :)
> AFAIK, open-uri is a wrapper round net/http anyway?
> 

True and true.  Also, George Marrows did the open-uri stuff, and one
of the best things about it is it *greatly* simplied our HTTP code.

> It just means you can replace the below with a simple
> open(url) generally. It picks up your proxy from the environment
> too, which is nice. Pity about the authentication, but that sounds
> like a simple bug/missing feature.
> 


Unfortunately a quick glance through open-uri.rb didn't yield an
obvious way to do proxy authentication.  It looks like open-uri.rb
doesn't use Net::HTTP::Proxy but rather just Net::HTTP.

I think it would definitely be worth looking into adding proxy
authentication support to open-uri.rb as opposed to hacking RubyGems
to work around it.  Unfortunately, I don't have a proxy that requires
authentication, so for me to do it would require that I setup Squid,
etc.  Might take a while.

Assuming open-uri doesn't support proxy authentication, would this be
something you (Adriano) would be interested in taking a shot at?

Thanks,
Chad