Bug#54524: http_proxy and web clients.

[Greg Stark <gsstark@mit.edu>]

Julian Gilbey <J.D.Gilbey@qmw.ac.uk> writes:

> On Sun, Jan 09, 2000 at 12:50:29AM -0300, Nicolas Lichtmaier wrote:
> > Package: debian-policy
> > 
> > This is already standard, but I think it should be into policy because I
> > already saw some programs deviating from this expected behaviour.
> > 
> > Web clients should default to try to fetch URLs by a direct connection to
> > the target host. If the `http_proxy' variable is defined, it should specify
> > an URL that would be used as a proxy. Programs should not try to access an
> > URL directly if this variable is defined. Programs that have the ability to
> > do it should also respect the ftp_proxy variable, but not all ftp clients
> > are forced to fo that, since it needs handling of the HTTP protocol.
> 
> Are these environment variables, settings in /etc/proxies or what?
> Interestingly, I was thinking about the same thing last week, but you
> beat me to it....

We should have an /etc/proxies or or something like that that all web clients
are required to honour unless http_proxy or no_proxy is set. It could be
simple, even be parsed by a common wrapper so the web client packagers could
just call that common wrapper to set http_proxy and no_proxy and then call the
regular client.

-- 
greg