Comment 4 for bug 1248672

@atit-anand-cs:

Let's first investigate some more the necessity for this and the proper way to do it.

I am definitely not a fan of duplicating existing working functionality. The fact that a major browser like Chrome does not provide separate proxy settings, but redirects to Ubuntu's default Settings/Network/Proxy settings makes me very reluctant to implement our own proxy settings. So we will have our own GUI for this only if we are absolutely certain we need one.

The very first step is to make sure Variety adheres and uses Ubuntu's manual proxy settings, and preferably takes changes to them into account immediately. This also includes checking why when launched on startup Variety does not honor these global settings and how this can be fixed.

Daniel says that many people might want to redirect only Variety's traffic trough a proxy, not all of the traffic. This is possible to achieve using an automatic proxy configuration: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_auto-config, combined with this Python library: https://code.google.com/p/pacparser/. This needs to be evaluated - is the library available in Universe repository of both 12.04 and 14.04, does it work OK. Also, is it easy to get the URL of the configured PAC in Ubuntu's proxy's settings, etc. If this can work, we would just need to provide an out-of-the box PAC file that people can use and instruct them to edit it in order to change the proxy servers.

How does this plan sound to you?