Comment 7 for bug 365570

I've long had a setup with an Acquire::http::proxy directive in /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/18proxy to provide the details of the apt-cacher proxy that my laptop accesses when at work. When I travel, it is extremely handy to be able to run 'http_proxy=DIRECT sudo apt-get whatever' and override the Acquire::http::proxy directive. http_proxy is one of the only environment variables that sudo is willing to pass along, which is perfect.

Then I upgraded from Intrepid to Lucid and this behavior is no longer respected. sudo no longer passes http_proxy, and even if I sudo -s myself a root shell, apt-get no longer respects DIRECT as an override for Acquire::http::proxy. The only way I've found around this so far is to edit /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/18proxy and comment out the line, then run my installation or upgrades, then edit the file again when I take the laptop back to work.

So I'm not sure about the complaints listed in this bug. I think I've had the opposite experience. And regardless of that, I consider the reported behavior to be correct, not buggy. Environment variables _should_ override static config files.