Re: Making package.el talk over Tor

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

I have been trying to understand how package.el calls url.el
but I can't begin to understand URL.  What are its entry points?
How is it supposed to be used?

The file url.el gives no information whatsoever about how that package
works or how to use it.  It creates a process only inside
url-open-rlogin, url-open-telnet and url-gateway-nslookup-host, but
these are buried deep inside its calling structure.

package.el calls a few url-... functions.  They are called from three
places that are subroutines or auxiliary macros, two of which have
next to no documentation of what they do.  The one that has some
information is package--with-work-buffer, whose doc string is very
abstract.  It could be used for almost anything.

      "Run BODY in a buffer containing the contents of FILE at LOCATION.
    LOCATION is the base location of a package archive, and should be
    one of the URLs (or file names) specified in `package-archives'.
    FILE is the name of a file relative to that base location.

    This macro retrieves FILE from LOCATION into a temporary buffer,
    and evaluates BODY while that buffer is current.  This work
    buffer is killed afterwards.  Return the last value in BODY."

I decided to change the calls to start-process.  I can do that without
undertsnading url.el.  Maybe it will work.

Would someone like to clean up the URL package and document
its structure, its entry points, and how to use them?

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)