GNU bug report logs - #27012
26.0.50; eww does not generate Referer headers

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From: peder <at> klingenberg.no (Peder O. Klingenberg)
To: 27012 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#27012: 26.0.50; eww does not generate Referer headers
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2017 01:03:48 +0200

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Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi <at> gnus.org> writes:

>     0 - always send referrer (default).
>     1 - only send if base domains match.
>     2 - only send if hosts match.
>
> Adding something like this (and defaulting to 1) might make sense for
> eww.

I took a stab at implementing this.  It was trickier than I had
anticipated.  The URL library already had a mechanism of sorts for
adding Referer headers, but it was as an optional argument to a helper
function, and there was no way (short of code changes) of making the
entry points of url.el pass that argument to the helper.

Changing the signature of the url entry points and tracking down every
caller didn't seem attractive to me.  Instead, I reasoned that the
referring url is a property of the page currently being displayed, so a
buffer-local variable seemed natural.

That hit a snag because eww uses url queues, and the queue runner didn't
care what the current buffer was.  So some requests got referrers, some
didn't.  I fixed the queue mechanism so it always calls url-retrieve
from the same buffer that queued up the job.

With the basic mechanism for sending the Referer header then working, I
looked at limiting the distribution of it.  url-privacy-level already
existed, and had a basic on-off-knob for referrers, or "lastloc", as it's
called in that variable.  I left that alone, but added an additional
user option - url-lastloc-privacy, with possible values "none",
"domain-match" and "host-match" corresponding to the levels mentioned
above, and with "domain-match" the default.

So with this patch, eww sets up the buffer local url-current-lastloc
when the page renders.  Subsequent requests, be they automatic
requests for images or other resources, or user-invoked link-following,
get the correct Referer header if the privacy settings allow it.

[0001-Make-eww-optionally-send-Referer-headers.patch (text/x-patch, attachment)]

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--
...Peder...

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