[referencer] Preliminary medline support (first python plugin)

[John Spray]

On Tue, 2008-01-01 at 20:44 +0100, Aurélien Naldi wrote:
> I dunno what kde/xfce/enlightenment/other do, but if you really want to
> be desktop agnostic, you can just use the "http_proxy" and friends env
> variables. At least under gnome they are set properly, I guess that kde
> does it as well. If it doesn't, it should anyway, to make sure that
> console applications keep working.

*sigh*

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/gnome-terminal/2.13/gnome-terminal-2.13.2.changes:

2006-01-16  Guilherme de S. Pastore  <gpastore at gnome.org>

	* src/terminal-screen.c: applied patch from John Spray to set
	  the http_proxy environment variable based on the GNOME proxy
	  settings. Closes bug #321952.

I have tricked you.  It's only set in the terminal.  Sorry! ;-)

In any case, it all depends on how the http work is being done.
Currently I'm using gnome-vfs, which reads its configuration from gconf
(not the environment).  Other platforms might have different libraries
with different configuration backends.

> Then, supporting windows/mac becomes harder :/ Speaking of this, do you
> know if referencer works with them ?

http://icculus.org/referencer/faq.html

> If you really want to show something up, you can have a button launching
> whatever configuration tool correspond to the detected desktop (starting
> with gnome seems natural, KDE would be nice

See above: if I fire up a KDE configuration tool, it's not going to
configure gnome-vfs.  Whether it should or not is someone else's
problem.

To have the "launch this environment's proxy configuration" applet
button would mean that referencer would have to be using a http client
library aware of the platform's proxy settings, which would mean using a
different http library on each platform, or using some magical one
(maybe it exists?) which knows what platform it's on.  Anyway, it would
mean something other that gnome-vfs, which I'm not interested in doing
myself.  It would only be worthwhile for a windows/mac port, which I'm
also not interested in doing (but will give plenty of support to anyone
else to do).

Convinced?

John