Comment 2 for bug 1929241

Now that ~7 months have past, I don't recall if I tried the env var. Probably not, because nothing in the docs suggests that the env var has any effect. The http_proxy environment variable is a convention. Some apps honor the convention and some don't. In the case at hand, there's nothing to even suggest that debootstrap is proxy-capable.

If it is proxy-capable, great, but we still have a bug b/c it's undocumented.