Last.fm Covers: improve proxy detection/port to Gio

[Scott Garman]

When using exaile, I've noticed when adding tracks to my playlist, the application will freeze up for 10-20 seconds, and the continue normally. I determined that this was only happening for albums where I did not have local cover art. which led me to suspect that the cover art fetching was having problems. I then realized these freeze-ups only happened when I was at work behind a proxy server. I have the proxy server set up correctly in my GNOME settings, and I suspect that the plugin does not honor these settings. Finally, I have confirmed that disabling the Last.fm cover art plugin fixes the symptom.

I realize this isn't incontrovertible proof of the problem, but hopefully it describes it enough that someone can reproduce it further.

I'm using Exaile 3.2.0 on Ubutnu 10.10 (Maverick), x86_64

[reacocard (reacocard)]

Seems like a reasonable supposition. Anyone know how GNOME exposes its proxy settings, and/or how we can most-trivially utilize them? There are probably other areas of Exaile that also fail to respect proxies (amazon covers? lastfm dynamic? audioscrobbling?), so we should look into that too.

[Joshua Lock (incandescant)]

I believe the accepted way is to read the proxy settings from gconf/dconf

[Johannes Sasongko (sjohannes)]

I remember similar discussion in the past, and I believe one of the proposed solutions was to use the http_proxy env var (IIRC urllib2 uses this automatically), though I don't know whether GNOME sets this.

[Mathias Brodala (mathbr)]

The standard way to define a proxy server is via the http_proxy environment variable, as mentioned. Since the Last.fm Covers plugin uses urllib, that environment variable is honored.

Thus if the GNOME control center does not keep that variable updated, it’s a bug in the control center.

[Ross Burton (ross)]

Environment variables are rather tricky to set in an application that's already running. They are a last resort in the modern world.

If you use GIO for networking you'll get automatic proxy support (including execution of PAC files, required in some networks). Otherwise there are gsetting keys that GNOME sets for you.

[Mathias Brodala (mathbr)]

Porting from urllib to Gio is certainly a valid point to check.

[Mathias Brodala (mathbr)]

The plugin has been ported to Gio with r4216.