[gnome-love] Gnome goal proposal : proxy support

["Lionel Dricot" <zeploum gmail com>]

Hello,

At work, I'm stuck behind a proxy with a password. I then discovered that a lot of application are not capable of handling a connection with a proxy. Others require a specific configuration while the proxy configuration is already available by Gnome. Last but not least, some applications use the Gnome proxy preferences but forget to handle proxy exceptions or handle proxy correctly only if no password is required.


The idea of my Gnome Goal proposal would be to have perfect and consistent proxy support in the whole Gnome desktop, which is a great asset in the corporate world.

To comply, applications should :

1) Connect seamlessly to the Internet if the proxy is configured in the gnome proxy settings (manually configured or with a pac file).

2) Have no proxy/network preferences or, if really needed, an option enabled by default "Use gnome/system settings"  (The only reason would be to allow application to work without Gnome. I cannot imagine why the hell network should be a per-application setting)

3) Connect seamlessly to the exceptions of the proxy (typical usage : intranet website)

4) If the proxy requires a password *and* the password is not set in the gnome-proxy-settings, then ask for it.

5) If the password is already in the gnome proxy settings, don't ask for it (unlike Epiphany).


In order to achieve this, we could make an howto on how to set a local proxy on your computer and, for a week or two, we will ask all Gnome developpers to eat their own dog food and only connect through their local proxy. I'm sure it will reveal a lot of eatches to scratch !


Do you believe it worth a Gnome Goal ? Or do you think that individual bug reports are enough for that. ?


BTW, I'm a strong proponent of location-based proxies (thus having proxy configuration related to the connection used in Network-Manager or, better, having the proxy configuration directly built in N-M) but I'm not sure that this request fit into this goal.
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=477040
https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-system-tools/+bug/173256


Thanks for reading, 

Lionel