From Mandriva

How applications support proxy settings and proposed improvements to this system

Contents 1 Proxy settings support 1.1 Drakproxy 1.2 urpmi 1.3 Mozilla Firefox 1.4 KDE 1.5 Gnome 1.6 wget 1.7 curl 1.8 MandrivaOnline 2 Summary 3 Applications without proxy support 4 Improvements 4.1 General improvements 4.2 Mozilla Firefox (and Mozilla Thunderbird)

Proxy settings support

Drakproxy

Drakproxy is a simple drakxtool whose only purpose is to set the $http_proxy and $ftp_proxy environment variables system-wide (also called *_proxy environment variables). It is done by creating two scripts in /etc/profile.d/ named proxy.sh and proxy.csh. These scripts are executed at login which means you have to log out to apply your proxy settings (or launch a login shell). Setting these variables is the only purpose of that tool : no change is done to any configuration file.

urpmi

urpmi has two ways to deal with proxy settings : globally and per-repository. Parameters are set in /etc/urpmi/proxy.cfg (for more information, see "man proxy.cfg"). Parameters can be set by editing this file or by using rpmdrake.

Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla firefox uses only its own settings and does not care about *_proxy environment variables. See below for a discussion about this issue.

KDE

All KDE apps (including konqueror) use global KDE settings set through kcontrol. The default is to use *_proxy environment variables.

Gnome

All Gnome apps (including epiphany) use global Gnome settings set through the gnome-control-center.

wget

curl

MandrivaOnline

Summary

This table states wether a specific application supports proxy settings and to which extent.

Application	[ftp|http]_proxy support	Automatic proxy settings support	Authenticating proxy support	Default behaviour
urpmi	?	N	Y	Connect directly
Mozilla Firefox	N	Y	Y	Connect directly
KDE	Y	Y	Y	$*_proxy
Gnome	N	Y	N	Connect directly
wget	Y	N	Y	$*_proxy
curl	Y	N	Y	Connect directly
MandrivaOnline	?	?	?	?
clamav	?	?	?	?

Applications without proxy support

List here applications known for not supporting proxy settings at all :

• Unknown

Improvements

General improvements

The general ideal situation would be :

• Have drakproxy handle proxy settings of all applications system-wide (user-overridable)
• Have settings applied immediately without requiring logout.
  • This is not going to happen in the near future see Bug #20052
• All applications should be able to use *_proxy variables
• All applications should use *_proxy variables as their default

To achieve these goals, drakproxy needs major improvements and several applications should be patched or modified upstream.

The other solution is to handle this problem with the help of freedesktop : dbus could be used to notify proxy settings to applications requiring them.

Supporting automatic proxy settings and authentication system-wide is much more difficult. It probably involves developing a library handling all proxy-related stuff and having programs calling it.

Mozilla Firefox (and Mozilla Thunderbird)

See Bug #10875