Add error reporting and help text if httpd can't make outbound network connections

A completed, B + C missing.

How can you distinguish in C between a regular timeout and blocked requests? It this is not possible, I'd not suggest blocking further tries on the updates if we cannot distinguish. Otherwise all sounds reasonable.

Should we log all failed drupal_http_requests() or just those related to update.module?

You can request the clean URL page -- if that fails, that's surely not a timeout.

B is impossible. Failure can have so many faces... you might even get a webpage telling you that stuff is denied. There are so many broken configs I would not try to figure out in drupal_get_request whether a request has failed. I will let every module decide for itself whether the result it got resembles what it expects.

Much better comments. (I was kind of satisfied that menu_execute_active_handler can run with any path :) otherwise I'd needed to patch that.) So we first get the JSON for the clean URL check -- why that? Because it's the simplest page I know. And then drupal_http_request it. The two should match.

Added title, too.

Thou shall not hack.

Keep it in system. I had good reasons to put it there -- others might want to use it and it's not like it's a big bloat or somethin'

There are many places that issues these requests. And yet we can't add simply to drupal_http_request because as I said above, failure can have many faces. We are adding this check after the reply does not parse.

Added a way to get the variable cleared.

- So why was calling of the clean URL check page considered hackish? This 'Nothing' menu items looks much more hackish to me. We can rename the clean URL check menu item to something more general to apply to both cases, if this is the only problem.

- It looks like that some code populates $result->error with an English message, while another part adds a t()-ed string (with a strange space at the start of the string). How is this supposed to work?

The clean menu URL issues a JS content type header which neatly fscks up the forthcoming plain HTML page. I am not aware of any way to remove an issued header and another content type header to mask the JS one, now that's a hack if I have ever seen one. The nothing entry is nice and compact :) The result error space is not significant now, I'll remove it later, the $result->error usually comes from fsockopen so it's usually not translated, so this special case is actually a bit better than other error strings.

Still you can name it "request-test" or whatever, not "nothing"...

As a suggestion, how about this:

+          'description' => $t('Your system or network configuration does not allow Drupal to access web pages, resulting in reduced functionality. This could be due to your webserver configuration or PHP settings, and should be resolved in order to download information about available updates, fetch aggregator feeds, sign in via OpenID, or use other network-dependent services.'),

in the place of this:

+          'description' => $t('For some reason (webserver configuration or PHP setting) Drupal can not fetch web pages. Because of this, it is impossible to download information about available updates, fetch aggregator feeds, ping other sites, OpenID does not work etc.'),

Not worth holding up the patch, but just thought I'd suggest in in case of a reroll for some other reason.

Renamed to request-test, added keith.smith 's text (thanks), changed deliberate no break to Deliberate because it's a sentence, removed the starting white space in aggregator.

I tested by adding a return; in the first line of function drupal_http_request to simulate the block. When trying to run the status update it returns the blocked report, and it is also indicated correctly on the status report page. After removing the return and running the update the warning disappears, also from the status report. I read the INSTALL.txt modification, it looks good to me.

hence i mark it RTBC

Hm, committed this one, thanks.

sorry this might be a really stupid question But how do i us this patch ?? sorry total newbie.. but I'm suffering the same problem.