Comment 14 for bug 13661

I think that any "quick fix" will be incomplete without WPAD support in apt's http backend. It means that automatic proxy settings in gconf cannot be honored. (assumption: Synaptic uses apt's http backend) You should report an error if gconf is set to automatic proxy.

Synaptic should have access rights to read any user's gconf proxy settings (since it's root.) Synaptic already runs the right GTK theme. Must be easy.

http_proxy environment variable is usually a bad solution because your username could contain '@' (common for domains) and the password could contain ':', and both are reserved characters in the http_proxy definition. That is usually solved by translating '@' to %40, etc. but that gets very, very ugly very quickly. Which '@' do you encode, and which do you skip? http_proxy is an incomplete solution. The data should be split into three different variables. Environment variables are also prone to leakage, meaning security risk.

I think the best "quick fix" is the hacky script wrapper in gksu. It just needs encoding/escaping for the username and password, and synaptic needs to un-encode it. (or use additional environment variables)

I would *love* proper proxy support -- it bites me every day. I'm just listing design problems you must overcome -- because there will be bug reports about missing WPAD support and funny characters in the passwords.