Doesn't respect GNOME proxy settings

[Iain Lane]

Docky doesn't respect the (gconf) GNOME proxy settings. If launched from a terminal with *_proxy exported then everything works fine, but mono's DefaultWebProxy property doesn't look at gconf to fall back if these env vars aren't exported.

There's code in f-spot to do this which could be ported:

  http://git.gnome.org/browse/f-spot/tree/src/Platform/Gnome/WebProxy.cs

[Robert Dyer (psybers)]

Shouldnt GNOME be exporting those env vars? Why should every single Mono app have to do this workaround to get it working when all GNOME has to do is export them and they magically work for every app?

[Iain Lane (laney)]

In the future this will be handled by libproxy, but it seems like the CLR bindings aren't functional just yet.

I was speaking to mvo on IRC about just that earlier, and he said that while that is a good idea in theory, in reality some apps allow the user to launch with http_proxy=foo blah to override the gconf settings, and apparently that would break. I don't think there's a realistic chance of distros (at least Ubuntu) doing this, sadly.

Chris S. said that he would handle integrating this code into Do and Docky for now. I hope that in the future we will be able to standardise around libproxy.

[Iain Lane (laney)]

also applications which rely on the env var only get the value at launch time. The advantage of this code is that it has event support so that apps can respond to changes in the proxy settings (eg when I move between home and work).