Uniform Proxy Settings

Dan Winship dwinship at redhat.com
Fri Oct 3 19:05:24 UTC 2008


KH KH wrote:
> 2008/10/2 Kulbir Saini <kulbirsaini at students.iiit.ac.in>:
>> Hi list,
>>
>>   Whenever I try a new version of Fedora, the first problem I face is
>> setting the proxy. It seems for almost every application, I have to specify
>> proxy at a different place. We have this "System -> Preferences -> Internet
>> and Network -> Network Proxy" app to specify proxy settings. But I wonder if
>> there is some application which obeys these settings.
>
> There is one: http://code.google.com/p/libproxy/
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=457035
> 
> I was waiting for upstream to answear to the patch before importing.
> (i will import soon)

To clarify, libproxy has multiple backends, so if it detects that you're
running in a GNOME session, it will look up proxy settings in GConf, and
if it detects that you're running in a KDE session, it will use kconfig,
and if none of those are set it will look at $http_proxy, or files in
/etc, or whatever else has been configured by your distro and/or
administrator.

And, it handles WPAD (Web Proxy Auto-Discovery) and PAC (Proxy
Auto-Configuration), which are the two annoying javascript-based proxy
configuration mechanisms.

And, for backends that support it (like GConf), it handles exception
lists ("use the proxy except when connecting to *.example.com and
192.168.0.0/24").

So it's generally a good thing. The catch is that not many apps are
using it yet. But the author is planning to propose it as a blessed
dependency for GNOME 2.26 (and have it be used in gvfs and libsoup), and
if that happens then that will pretty much guarantee that other distros
have to ship it too, at which point it becomes easier for more apps to
decide to depend on it, and eventually we might just reach uniform proxy
setting nirvana.

-- Dan




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