Re: [fetchmail-users] fetchmail and socks5

[Matthias A. <mat...@gm...>]

Jochen Hayek schrieb:
>>>>>> Rob MacGregor writes:
> 
>> On 3/18/07, Matthias Andree <mat...@gm...> wrote:
> 
>     RM> if fetchmail is linked with the socks libraries
>     RM> *and* the required socks config file
>     RM> is in place then, by default, use socks.
> 
> Pls remember: readymade distro fetchmails may come linked with the socks library,
> but its user is still quite likely not aware of it.

That's the distributor's business, not that of the fetchmail
maintainers. See - if they change the defaults, they need to support
those changes. And the default fetchmail compilation options DO NOT
include socks support.

We cannot afford - and I personally do not even want - to support every
compilation or perhaps patch variant there is in practice.

> I recently spent quite some hours (to be honest: far too many) on evaluating,
> whether and with which socks server certain applications like "wget" and "curl" work resp. don't work.

I understand your frustration, but what has this got to do with
fetchmail? I'm very much with Rob Funk here, if there is a system-wide
configuration, we should just use it -- the possibility for local
override is documented now.

> 
> Trust me (pls!), neither explicit nor implicit sockisification *usually* work out of the box,
> ie. w/o changing the code,
> so somebody ("a user"), who "moves" into an enforced socks server environment, 
> will have to try / verify socksification on every single application on its own,
> and not all at once by toggling the one and only global switch.

echo >>$HOME/.profile 'SOCKS_CONF=/dev/null ; export SOCKS_CONF'
. .profile

Csh left as an exercise to the reader.

> I seriously plea for: the default shall be: "off".

Noted for consideration for the fetchmail 6.4 branch.