Feature Proposal: Add User Agent to configure

Motivation

A corporate environment that has a proxy may limit the outbound web traffic to certain user agents, such as to user agent strings of common browsers. A configurable user agent in TWiki can work around this issue by setting the user agent to, say, Mozilla/5.0.

Description and Documentation

The user agent is sent when TWiki is accessing external pages, such as via INCLUDE, HeadlinesPlugin or the like. It is currently hard-coded to "TWiki::Net/nnnnn libwww-perl/n.nn", where n are digits. A new {INCLUDE}{UserAgent} configure setting can be set to override the default.

Impact

Implementation

1. Add this documentation to TWiki.spec just below {INCLUDE}{AllowURLs}:

# **STRING 30 EXPERT**
# Set the user agent TWiki is using when requesting external resources
# such as including URLs. Default is =TWiki/n.n.n= (current TWiki version).
$TWiki::cfg{INCLUDE}{UserAgent} = '';

2. Change TWiki::Net to use {INCLUDE}{UserAgent} setting if set, else use TWiki/n.n.n when requesting external resources. There are two places, one with LWP, one with a direct socket connection if LWP is not installed.

I suggest to enhance trunk, as well as the TWiki 4.2 branch since it is a small and safe change. But this is the call of the release manager.

-- Contributors: PeterThoeny - 16 Dec 2008

Discussion