[Synaptic-devel] proxy

[Radu Grigore]

In my synaptic (0.62.5, from ubuntu) I see the following network settings:
 1. Direct connection.
 2. Manual proxy connection.

I can't check if this is in the current HEAD since the link [0] from
the homepage [1] leads to an empty directory.

Anyway, I saw that some old discussions [2] that suggest there should be a
  3. System wide setting.
and I think there should be one.

On my old laptop I switched to xubuntu hoping that xfce uses less
resources than gnome. A few of weeks afterwards I noticed that
Synaptic stopped working. (In the meantime I used apt from the command
line.) It failed with "403 Forbidden" and it took me some time to
notice that the IPs are those of a proxy I use at work. But then I
couldn't understand why is it looking at those IPs given that I
selected (1), not (2). If (3) would have been an allowed choice, then
everything would have been clear. Worse, if I intentionally set a
wrong proxy (2), try to reload, then go back to (1) it would work
until I restart synaptic, at which point it will try to connect to the
old proxy. It's very weird for (1) to mean "the system wide setting if
you just started synaptic, or really direct setting if you just
happened to switch from the manual proxy setting."

On xubuntu, you can only reset the "system-wide proxy settings" by
using gconftool-2 from the command line, AFAICT. For this reason I'd
prefer if the label would say "gconf system-wide setting". And perhaps
there should be one for "APT system-wide setting".

regards,
  radu


[0] http://people.ubuntu.com/~mvo/bzr/synaptic/synaptic--main/
[1] http://www.nongnu.org/synaptic/index.html
[2] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/synaptic-devel/2004-07/msg00027.html