Re: [Synaptic-devel] Automatic Proxy setting

[Jaap Haitsma]

> On Mon, Jul 19, 2004 at 01:29:39AM +0200, Michael Vogt wrote:
>> > It would be nice if synaptic would respect the Gnome Proxy Setting
>> which
>> > you can select under Desktop Preferences. Now I always have to change
>> > the proxy setting of synaptic depending if I'm at work or at home.
>> > The GNOME Proxy setting can handle automatic proxy settings and if it
>> > doesn't find these it assumes that the PC is connected directly to the
>> > internet
>>
>> Yes, this is a common feature request. It's actually not hard to
>> implement, but I'm unsure about the user interface. What do you think
>> about something like this:
>> [ ] No proxy
>> [ ] Use proxy settings from /etc/apt/apt.conf
>> [ ] Use gnome proxy settings
>> [ ] Manual proxy settings
>
> I hacked a prototype of my idea and I noticed that it's actually more
> difficult than I expected at first.
>
> 1. synaptic needs to run as root. So if you set a proxy in gnome
> settings under your normal user, gconf will not have those values
> available for root.
>
> 2. I don't know how to get the values that gnome gets from the
> autoconfiguration proxy method (manual method is no problem).

Would be nice if autoconfiguration also worked, but I don't know
how that works either

>
> 2) is not a big deal, but 1) is really tricky. Does anyone have a good
> idea?

I think if you use  libgksu
http://packages.debian.org/unstable/libs/libgksu1.2-0 in synaptic you can
start running synaptic as a user, (so you can get the user gnome proxy
settings) and then ask the root password

Jaap