khotnewstuff4 fails to load providers.xml

[doug]

After a disk failure, I had to do a completely fresh kubuntu 16.04.1 install.
I decided I hated the breeze style and was looking for something resembling classic.

Every menu within system-settings that tries to search online for new styles
or icons or whatever, specifies in a file in, for example /etc/xdg/aurorae.knsrc
that:
    ProvidersUrl=http://downloads.kde.org/ocs/providers.xml

Unfortunately, the server now redirects that URL to:
              https://autoconfig.kde.org/ocs/providers.xml

That file should be retrieved by khotnewstuff4, which also works from the
commandline like:

     $> khotnewstuff4 /etc/xdg/aurorae.knsrc

Currently, this fails, I suspect because iether it doesn't know how to handle the
server redirect, or, it doesn't know how to handle HTTPS.

I grabbed a copy of providers.xml and installed it in an apache2 /var/www/html folder,
modified the ProvidersUrl to point to it on http://localhost... and then it worked just fine.

Hope you folks can sort this out!
Thanks

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Liviu Gelea (liviu-gelea)]

I'm having the same problem. I'm ready to provide any information that would help find the problem.
You might want to know that i have the dns order in nsswitch set to "files dns" and a proxy.