Comics: add proxy support

[Wittke]

Comics does not support proxy usage.

Im using awn & awn extras Version 0.3.2.1-0ubuntu3 in Jaunty from Jaunty Repository universe.

In detail: Im behind a firewall with proxy requires user name and password.

[Wittke (rwittke)]

I was able to workaroung it for Comics Dilbert, by adding "export http_proxy=http://user:pass@ip:port/ in awn-autostart for autostartup and avant-window-navigator when manually starting it. I did not tested it what happens next, for update Dilbert., I do not restart my comp all day. And Im not sure that this is a secure way to do that.

[Moses Palmér (mosespalmer)]

Did that solution work?

Unfortunately, Python on *nix does not retrieve the proxy settings by itself. It does read the environment variable that you have set, and it gives you (the programmer that is) the possibility to specify the proxy settings yourself, but then you (again, the programmer) would of course need to know them.

I do not think that it would be a good idea for the Comics! applet to provide these settings.

Is there an AWN developer that knows whether any of the required dependencies of AWN provide a way to determine proxy settings?

[Mark Lee (malept)]

There unfortunately isn't a uniform way to do so, as far as I know.

In theory, since the Comics! applet uses urllib, there should automatically be http_proxy support (see <http://docs.python.org/library/urllib.html#urllib.urlopen>). If it doesn't work, I don't know why.

[Wittke (rwittke)]

I was able to solve it by adding the line export http_proxy=http://user:pass@ip:port/ to both files awn-autostart for autostartup and avant-window-navigator. I will set this for my user as user variable. Dilbert was also updated at next day automatically. May it could be a nice feature for next versions of Ubuntu to set also this variable to system by setting up Network-Proxy as a flag or by default.

[Mark Lee (malept)]

Wittke:

To be clear, which applet are you referring to? There are two comic-fetching applets in Awn Extras: Comic (no s), which has a Dilbert icon, and Comics! (s plus exclamation point), which Moses maintains.

[Wittke (rwittke)]

Sorry if I was not clear by reporting the bug.

Its the one which is containing dilbert.

kind regards
Rolf

[Mark Lee (malept)]

This bug is about the other applet, for two reasons:

1) Comic is unmaintained and will be removed in the 0.4 series.
2) We have not yet verified if the Comics! applet works with proxies, while you have verified that comic does.

[Moses Palmér (mosespalmer)]

This is not a bug in the Comics! applet nor in AWN.