Bug#54524: http_proxy and web clients.

[Greg Stark <gsstark@mit.edu>]

Nicolás Lichtmaier <nick@debian.org> writes:

>  You have a cost in being non-standard, and I don't think it is worth it
> this time. What benefits would give us what you propose?

The cost is greater than /etc/mailname or /etc/papersize ?

Debian long ago decided not to worry about the issue of being different and
just build the best distribution it can be. Of course being compatible is
important, but if we just want to do everything the same as Red Hat then why
bother?

Every option should ideally be controllable by:
 a) an environment variable
 b) a ~/.<foo>rc file of some sort
 c) a /etc/<foo>rc file of some sort

in that order of priority. There are lots of benefits to having each of these
available. Merely putting http_proxy in /etc/environment will often surprise
you when things like su - bar -c wget fail to use the proxy, or when commands
run from boot scripts that clear environment variables. 

Setting /etc/lynx.conf doesn't provide a convenient single place to configure
the default system behaviour. Like /etc/mailname, /etc/papersize, and in many
other cases it's useful to have a single place to configure the default
behaviour of all tools, especially since it's very likely that you would want
to set everything at once when a new proxy server is installed or configured.

The package with the wrapper could also have an update-proxies script that
packages like squid and wwwoffle would call that would optionally offer to set
up the /etc/proxies file depending on the user's preferences. Or I guess
debconf might provide a way to do that now.

-- 
greg