Comment 8 for bug 365570

@Eric Angell,

Respectfully, I disagree. I am in the process of setting up 10 Ubuntu servers for various tasks. My company has a site wide proxy, and this is the ONLY way to get a connection into or out of the building for all protocols and ports. (There are various reasons for this, and it isn't something I can change or even recommend changing. I have to deal with it).

As such, to provide a convenient environment on my servers, I have configured them with the http_proxy environment variable, and everything works great. The only thing that does NOT work the way that it should is apt. I have 10 servers. Each of which are configured to pull updates daily. While that isn't a huge amount of data to download, it is enough that I'd much rather have a local mirror. Towards that end, I've installed apt-cacher-ng. I set the proxy information in /etc/apt/apt.conf.d, as this is the only program out of all the dozens of programs on the machine that I DON'T want talking to the company proxy.

The environment variable should be for the general purpose usage of the system. In the general case, all programs should direct their web traffic through the server listed in the http_proxy environment variable. However, any program that has been given a specific proxy to follow in its own local configuration system should do so.

So since apt overwrites its internally configured proxy with the global environment proxy, and apt clearly ignores the no_proxy environment variable (I have tested this throughly. Apt is clearly ignoring no_proxy), I am left few options (suggestions welcome here...) other than to configure each application on each server to use the corporate proxy, and then configure apt to use the apt-cacher-ng proxy, as opposed to configuring the system wide variable and then apt.

In effect, this behavior is causing me a lot of unnecessary work.