A sole, standard proxy library for Fedora

Philip Prindeville philipp_subx at redfish-solutions.com
Fri May 26 17:11:50 UTC 2006


I have a laptop that travels with me from work (where there's the
use of web proxies) to home (where I don't), and was overwhelmed
by the number of config files that I have to switch over every time
I move from one place to the other.

The list of applications is seemingly endless:

* apt
* yum
* wget
* rpm
* thunderbird
* firefox
* evolution
* sunbird
* the myriad of scripts in Perl using libwww, etc.

And it struck me:  why not have a single libproxy.so for Fedora
(or Linux/Freebsd) that has a single, system-wide copy of the state,
rather than embedding *system-wide* state into each application's
configuration?

Windows does this: there's a single control panel you go into to
enable/disable proxy services.

Why can't Linux do that?

How hard would it be to find the best/most extensible proxy sources
out there, round them out to cover all possible services (including
IMAP, Socks, RealAudio, etc) and then patch all of the applications
incrementally (or have the owners patch each application) to make use
of the Single, Unified Proxy Library (supple)?

What am I missing here?  It seems so obvious that I'm surprised it
hasn't already been done.

-Philip






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