Known issues, bugs and limitations

  • There are issues with ICAT server 4.8.0 and older when using suds-community, see Issue #72 for details. Use suds-jurko when you need to talk to those older ICAT servers. See also the Section on Suds in the install instructions.

  • If supported by the ICAT server (icat.server 4.9.0 and newer), the icat.config module queries the server for information on available authenticators and the credential keys they require for login. The configuration variables for these keys are then adapted accordingly. Therefore, the set of configuration variables depends on the ICAT server and the available authentication plugins. But the help message displayed by the –help command line option is static. As a result, this help message is not always accurate. When connecting to a specific ICAT service, it may happen that different configuration variables and thus command line arguments are effective then those shown by the generic help message.

  • The return value of the formal string representation operator of icat.query.Query can not be used to recreate another query object with the same value as required by Python standards, see Issue #94 for details.

  • The entries in the no_proxy configuration variable are matched against the host part of the URL by simple string comparison. The host is excluded from proxy use if its name ends with any item in no_proxy. It is not checked whether the matching part starts with a domain component. E.g. setting no_proxy=ion.example.org will not only exclude icat.ion.example.org, but also lion.example.org, although the latter is not in the ion.example.org domain. IP addresses are not supported in no_proxy. This is a limitation in the implementation of the underlying Python library.