[Libosinfo] [libosinfo PATCH 0/7] Drop GVFS dependency in favour of libsoup

[Cole Robinson]

On 7/2/19 2:07 PM, Fabiano Fidêncio wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 2, 2019 at 1:51 AM Cole Robinson <crobinso at redhat.com> wrote:
>>
>> On 6/27/19 8:56 AM, Fabiano Fidêncio wrote:
>>> Let's rely on libsoup in order to to http://, https://, and ftp://
>>> requests.
>>>
>>> By doing this, GVFS (more specifically, gvfs-http) won't be dragged as
>>> a dependency, which caused errors for apps running as root (as GVFS
>>> relies on being run in the user's session).
>>>
>>> https://gitlab.com/libosinfo/libosinfo/issues/30
>>>
>>> Fabiano Fidêncio (7):
>>>   media: Fix indentation in create_from_location_asunc_data_free()
>>>   tree: Remove not used Tree from _CreateFromLocationAsyncData struct
>>>   media: Improve on_location_read error message readability
>>>   media: Use GInpuStream directly in on_location_read()
>>>   media: Use libsoup for http://, https://, and ftp:// requests
>>>   tree: Use libsoup for http://, https://, and ftp:// requests
>>>   spec: Drop gvfs dependency
>>>
>>>  configure.ac          |   5 +-
>>>  libosinfo.spec.in     |   2 +-
>>>  osinfo/Makefile.am    |   5 +-
>>>  osinfo/libosinfo.syms |   2 +
>>>  osinfo/osinfo_media.c |  86 ++++++++++++++++++++++++---------
>>>  osinfo/osinfo_tree.c  | 108 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-------------
>>>  osinfo/osinfo_tree.h  |  11 +++++
>>>  7 files changed, 159 insertions(+), 60 deletions(-)
>>>
>>
>> Does libsoup actually handle FTP?
> 
> Theoretically, yes:
> https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libsoup/blob/master/libsoup/soup-uri.h#L35
> 

I just grepped through the sources and git log, I don't see any evidence
that it supports actual use of the ftp protocol, unless it's using some
extra library for that. There's mention of http-aliases which seems to
indicate that libsoup can be taught to treat ftp:// URLs as just an
alias for http://, and the git log seems to suggest that was the
historical default.

>> Googling doesn't turn up any obvious
>> hits. That said I don't know if GVFS handles it either.
> 
> It also should, through gvfs-ftp, which seems to just use GSocket
> under the hood.
> >> With the
>> virt-manager test suite and libosinfo git master, I see:
>>
>> $ ./setup.py test_urls --debug --force-libosinfo --only fedora-ftp
>> ...
>> DEBUG    Error creating libosinfo tree object for
>> location=ftp://ftp.tu-chemnitz.de/pub/linux/fedora/linux/releases/30/Server/x86_64/os/
>> : g-io-error-quark: Failed to load .treeinfo|treeinfo file: The
>> specified location is not mounted (16)
>> ...
>>
>> So it doesn't seem to work anyway. But with your patch series it hangs
>> until it hits a two minute socket timeout. Which makes me wonder if
>> libsoup is trying to talk http to an ftp URL.
> 
> May be the case and may be a bug in libsoup.
> 
>>
>> FWIW I don't think that should be an argument for keeping a gvfs
>> dependency. It's getting hard to even find public ftp mirrors these days
> 
> Indeed.
> I'm wondering about the check to do. Hardcoding "https://", "http://"
> seems quite bad.

FWIW that's what we've done in virt-install for years and it's never
really been a problem.

 Maybe I should just create the file and then check
> for g_file_is_native() as done in osinfo-db-tools?

I'd need to study up on this approach more to give an opinion. I think
the important thing is to try and limit accidental access to gvfs,
unless it's for an explicit case we really don't care much about like ftp://

- Cole