Re: [O] Connecting to Org ELPA via an HTTP proxy from Emacs 25 and older

[Roland Everaert]

I also face the same problem, which forces me to download and install manually the package instead of using the ELPA repo.

I would also appreciate a change in behavior of the webserver.

Thanks,

Roland.

On Wed, Mar 14, 2018 at 11:14 PM, Keshav Kini <address@hidden> wrote:

Hi,

This mail is about the Org ELPA repository, not Org itself.  Please
let me know if I've mailed the wrong list.

Inside my corporate network, I must connect to external hosts such as
orgmode.org via an HTTP proxy.  Most programs on my machine are able
to access both HTTP and HTTPS URLs through the proxy without any
problem.

However, it seems that Emacs's URL package, used by many Emacs tools
including package.el, has been unable to properly establish HTTPS
connections over an HTTP proxy for a long time:

  https://debbugs.gnu.org/11788

A patch which fixes this problem was written in 2015 by Tao Fang but
is not currently present in any released Emacs version.  (It will be
incorporated into Emacs 26, according to the NEWS.26 file in the Emacs
development repository.)

Meanwhile, the orgmode.org web server is currently responding to HTTPS
requests with an HTTP 301 status, redirecting the client to the
corresponding HTTPS URL, i.e. it tries to force the client to use
HTTPS.  This is in contrast with a couple of other major ELPA
repositories, MELPA and GNU ELPA:

| $ curl -Is http://orgmode.org/elpa/archive-contents | head -1
| HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
| $ curl -Is http://melpa.org/packages/archive-contents | head -1
| HTTP/1.1 200 OK
| $ curl -Is http://elpa.gnu.org/packages/archive-contents | head -1
| HTTP/1.1 200 OK

This would seem to mean that anyone using an unpatched non-development
version of Emacs today is unable to connect to the Org ELPA from
behind an HTTP proxy.  I gather that this must be a recent change in
behavior, because I have been able to download packages from the Org
ELPA in the past without any trouble.

Would it be possible for whoever maintains the orgmode.org web server
to reconfigure it so that it responds to HTTP requests directly as it
used to do, instead of redirecting to HTTPS?

Thanks,
    Keshav