Sugar should directly get proxy settings from gconf

[sridhar]

Sugar gets its proxy settings from $http_proxy. The exception is Browse, which uses gconf.

This can be confusing and difficult for users. They must set their proxy in a GNOME tool (gnome-network-properties), which only affects Browse in Sugar. There is no easy way to set it for the rest of Sugar. Important functions like Software Update will not work.

We have a workaround in OLPC AU's XO-AU OS:  http://dev.laptop.org.au/issues/337

It would be much better if Sugar used gconf directly instead of needing $http_proxy to be set. This would avoid duplication and allow us to write a nice Sugar GUI to set the proxy.

This is an important bug to fix for any network that has proxies that are not transparent. Schools in Australia are like this.

[sridhar]

Probably a separate issue, but yum keeps its own separate proxy config. It might be a good idea to ensure that a proxy defined in the GUI will also allow yum to work through the proxy.

[sridhar]

According to silbe (on IRC),

"Sugar" doesn't get its proxy from anywhere currently - if we happen to evaluate http_proxy, it happens inside some component we use, probably Python.
we don't provide a custom network library, so no, there's no global setting.

We could work on getting Software Update to read gconf.

Ideally, maybe Sugar should have a unified network library that components and activities can use?

[sascha_silbe]

Python uses the <protocol>_proxy environment variables by default. If we add a listener for gconf change events (for the Gnome proxy settings) in sugar.activity.Activity and set the corresponding environment variables based on that, activities might work without modification.

[sascha_silbe]

Related gio API:  GProxyResolver