Living with a proxy

Living with a proxy

[Konrad Hinsen]

Hi everyone,

Here I come with my first problem...

When I use my laptop at work, any use of "guix download" (and any
package install etc.) ends with

   ERROR: In procedure connect: Network is unreachable

But I can download the exact same URL with wget. With that kind of
problem I tend to blame my network's Web proxy. I have configured it
by setting the environment variable http_proxy, which most Linux
software uses for this purpose. Does guix perhaps need something else?

Konrad.

Re: Living with a proxy

[Ludovic Courtès]

Konrad Hinsen <konrad.hinsen@fastmail.net> skribis:

> When I use my laptop at work, any use of "guix download" (and any
> package install etc.) ends with
>
>    ERROR: In procedure connect: Network is unreachable
>
> But I can download the exact same URL with wget. With that kind of
> problem I tend to blame my network's Web proxy. I have configured it
> by setting the environment variable http_proxy, which most Linux
> software uses for this purpose. Does guix perhaps need something else?

Currently Guix uses Guile’s HTTP client, which doesn’t support proxies
(the FTP client doesn’t either.)  It should support it though.

It shouldn’t be too difficult to implement, but I’m not too familiar
with all that, so I’d welcome ideas and patches.  ;-)

(In the meantime, you could use wget + ‘guix hash’, but then you’ll again
stumble upon that problem when Guix tries to download other things.)

Thanks,
Ludo’.

Re: Living with a proxy

[Konrad Hinsen]

Ludovic Courtès writes:

 > Currently Guix uses Guile’s HTTP client, which doesn’t support proxies
 > (the FTP client doesn’t either.)  It should support it though.
 > 
 > It shouldn’t be too difficult to implement, but I’m not too familiar
 > with all that, so I’d welcome ideas and patches.  ;-)

Proxies are a big mess, so my first idea is to let someone else do the
hard work.

More concretely, I was thinking if libcurl, for which there are already
Guile bindings:

   http://www.lonelycactus.com/guile-curl.html

But I can't say if the functionality of libcurl is sufficient for
all network access done by Guix.

Konrad.

Re: Living with a proxy

[Ludovic Courtès]

Konrad Hinsen <konrad.hinsen@fastmail.net> skribis:

> Ludovic Courtès writes:
>
>  > Currently Guix uses Guile’s HTTP client, which doesn’t support proxies
>  > (the FTP client doesn’t either.)  It should support it though.
>  > 
>  > It shouldn’t be too difficult to implement, but I’m not too familiar
>  > with all that, so I’d welcome ideas and patches.  ;-)
>
> Proxies are a big mess, so my first idea is to let someone else do the
> hard work.

That’s a plan I can only agree with.  ;-)

> More concretely, I was thinking if libcurl, for which there are already
> Guile bindings:
>
>    http://www.lonelycactus.com/guile-curl.html

So, the problem is that Guix currently uses HTTP and FTP clients
entirely written in Scheme.  Besides the aesthetic advantage, it allows
us to have one fewer dependency, and greatly simplifies distro
bootstrapping (as soon as we have Guile running, we can start
downloading what’s needed.)

So I would really like to have proxy support in our own HTTP and FTP
clients.  I’ll take a look, or tweak some other Guile hacker into doing
it.  ;-)

Thanks,
Ludo’.