Comment 7 for bug 1248672

@Atit
If it is not intuitive enough, we may eventually provide an editing tool, or a webservice for this, or do it from inside Variety's GUI.
The benefit is that when proxies are configured this way, the wallpaper sites will work everywhere - in Variety and in the browser. Otherwise we'll have Variety working and when you click "View at Wallbase.cc/Flickr/whatever" you get no connection.

But leave the PAC thing alone for now. In the end it might end up easier to be able to simply set a proxy specifically for Variety, but this does not relieve us from fallbacking to the global proxy setting when the user decides he wants to use it. So the most immediate task here is to try and make Variety work live with the currently configured global proxy.

The way I would do this is this:
1. Check how from Python to get the manual proxy configuration for HTTP, HTTPS from Ubuntu's settings. It must be some gconf call or something.
2. Check where Variety makes requests - most of these end up calling Util.urlopen in the end, maybe there are a couple of more places (FacebookHelper was using Curl for some reason)
3. Change those few "core" places like Util.urlopen to query what the current proxy is (if any) and use the appropriate proxy for the request (http vs https).

I.e. there is no need to listen for change events here, just use whatever the current proxy is when you need it.