Re: HTTP fetching

Joachim> Your package-transport.el looks great; I'll hook it up to Joachim> package-get.el. SJT> url.el (from the w3 package) plus some config junk elsewhere in SJT> that package is sufficient to get http running, IIRC. As Steve wrote already, he implemented basic HTTP fetching in his package-transport.el; I think I'll start with it. We'll need to see what is really necessary to fetch packages from an XEmacs proxie, and may add this later. Due to personal circumstances, I might be interested to add proxy support, including authenticated proxies. (Several of my clients allow Internet access only by means of authenticated proxies.) Joachim> Concerning my proposal above: It started with a design Joachim> question. Is the transport protocol a property of a Joachim> download site, or an overall property? SJT> It's both. The fetch mechanism needs to know what transport to SJT> use, obviously, and that varies by site. On the other hand, SJT> locally XEmacs doesn't know that FTP is dropped at the firewall SJT> until the user expresses a preference. This preference would be SJT> implemented as a filter and ordering on URL schema (or whatever SJT> our equivalent is going to be). Interesting point, this is an important UI issue. As I've written already, I think that the transport protocol is part of a download site description. If a site offers two download possibilities, that's two logical sites; e.g., ftp://ftp.xemacs.org/pub/xemacs/packages/ and http://ftp.xemacs.org/pub/xemacs/packages/ are two different entries in the download site menu list. But this way the menu list gets quite long and unwieldy, further means to structure or filter it would be good. When the user customizes a preferred transport protocol, one can show only sites with that protocol. Or, one can have the transport protocol as submenus for the sites iff a site has more than one protocol. This might need some experimentation to get good usability. Joachim -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Joachim The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the Rödermark, Germany one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" <jschrod(a)acm.org&gt; (I found it!) but "That's funny..." [Isaac Asimov]