cli: validation of urls fails by default when run offline

[decathorpe]

When running the validation tool with default settings without internet connection, it chokes on validation of URLs (of course). This shouldn't be a fatal error (except maybe when --pedantic or --net is passed?). For example, this default behaviour prevents running upstream tests (meson test, or make check, etc.) during fedora package builds.

[ximion]

Can you please specify what happens when you run the tool? Does it throw errors, or does it hang?

EDIT: From reading the report again, it seems like you are running appstreamcli without the --nonet flag. If so, pass that flag and any tests requiring network access will be disabled.

[decathorpe]

That's exactly my point: I can't pass the --nonet flag without having to modify upstream's test definitions (in CMake or meson) downstream - which defeats the whole point of wanting to run the original upstream tests ...
For example, running meson test just times out after 30 seconds while validating an .appdata.xml file - it looks like appstreamcli hangs without internet access.

[ximion]

I think this really should be addressed in some way in the respective upstream projects to pass --nonet if needed.
I can however, to make this easier to address for distributions and in case upstream always wants this enabled on their CI and doesn't want to provide a specific option to disable it, add an environment variable to disable network access as well.

[decathorpe]

The env variable looks like a good solution for now. Thank you!