System can't upgrade behind proxy due to /usr/lib/update-notifier/package-data-downloader not using system or apt proxy

[Bartłomiej Żogała]

/usr/lib/update-notifier/package-data-downloader doesn't use system proxy defined in KDE or apt proxy defined in , what causes flashplugin-installer failure during automatic system upgrade.
It uses only environment variables, which aren't always set for both localuser and root account, also using it at all is not good programing practice.

Currenly it's defined in this way:

def process_download_requests():
[...]

        # Get our proxy settings from the environment
        proxies = {}
        try:
                for proto in ('http','https','ftp'):
                        try:
                                proxies[proto] = os.environ[proto+"_proxy"]
                        except KeyError:
                                pass

                if proxies:
                        urllib._urlopener = urllib.FancyURLopener(proxies)
        except Exception:
                pass
        print "DEBUG: os.environ: %r" % os.environ
        print "DEBUG: proxy %r" % proxies

[Matthew Goode (happyhouse19)]

In my case the proxy I am using has basic authentication and this bug causes a particular problem when upgrading using the GUI. Whereas in the terminal you are asked for the username and password for the proxy specified by the environmental variable, the GUI just hangs as there is no prompt for the user's proxy details.