Bug#54524: http_proxy and web clients.

[Nicolás Lichtmaier <nick@debian.org>]

>  > > I think your ideas may be suitable for wishlist bugs against packages
>  > > that don't do what you want, but it shouldn't go into policy.
>  > 
>  >  No. The maintainers could close the wishlist without doing anything.
> 
>  I think that they would only do so if they have a good reason not to
> honour your behaviour.

 Hum... like disliking the standard behaviour. 

 Please could you give one example of such a good reason?

>  >  The policy is just a tool to set a standard nehavious of programs, and I
>  > think that a standard behaviour is useful here:  When I set a system that
>  > many users will use, I will configure it so the users son't need to be
>  > bothered by anything. That includes setting the proper http_* variables in
>  > /etc/profile, and it works great, since wget, lynx, netscape and others
>  > respect those vars. What I am saying is that we should recognize this common
>  > practice in our policy...
> 
> I don't think so - indeed policy says that packages shouldn't depend
> on environment variables for their correct behaviour(3.9). I don't
> disagree that http_proxy as an environment variable is common
> practice, but I do disagree strongly that this should be made policy -
> you'd have to do away with policy section 3.9 for starters...

 Uh? Environment variables should not be needed for proper operation, but
you are taking that too far. In your world there wouldn't be a place for
environment variables at all!

 They obviuously are designed to modify the user "environment", and we
already have plenty of standard ones... like PAGER, EDITOR, SHELL...