Update Manager and synaptic HTTP Proxy settings

Bug #21536 reported by Laurent Simonneau
18
This bug affects 2 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
update-manager (Ubuntu)
Confirmed
Wishlist
Michael Vogt

Bug Description

Synaptic and update manager does not support proxy authentication.
IMHO, these two packages should use gome proxy settings.

For synaptic, this problem is solved by writing proxy settings in apt.conf.
But update-manager can't download informations for the Changes tab.

Revision history for this message
Michael Vogt (mvo) wrote :

Thanks for your bugreport.

It's tricky to use gnome proxy settings because both applications run as root
and can't connect to the users gconf session.
But I agree that there should be a solution to this problem.

Revision history for this message
Jeff Rasmussen (jeffrasmussen) wrote :

I ran into the same problem. Update-manager should at least use apt.conf proxy settings and then we can give users a APT-proxy gui tool.

A workaround is to run "gksu gnome-network-preferences". We could add a network preferences icon to the System --> Administration menu that points to "gksu gnome-network-preferences" and label the icon as "Network Proxy (root)"

Revision history for this message
Jeff Rasmussen (jeffrasmussen) wrote :

I think we can confirm this bug and keep it as a wishlist importance

Changed in update-manager:
status: Unconfirmed → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
betchern0t (paulc-singlespoon) wrote :

The behaviour on feisty that I see is that it half uses the proxy settings in gnome. It ignores the ignore local addresses settings but still attempts to use the proxy settings. Hard coding proxy credentials although a common solution should be frowned upon. Since I have the proxy set to use the weather applet, I have to disable the proxy to get update manager to work correctly.

Revision history for this message
Pik Master (pikmaster) wrote :

Very annoying, I could not upgrade from feisty to gutsy (7.04 -> 7.10) and I could not find a reason.
Additionaly, id does not honor the automatic configuration URL (PAC file), nor has the option to autodetect network settings (but this is an error for gnome-network-manager).
Please, make the update manager honors the proxy settings from /etc/apt/apt.conf

What is more frustrating, it did not give any message, like "could not connect to see if there is a new distribution available" but it just shown the text that "your distribution is up-to-date".

Revision history for this message
Brian Pitts (bpitts) wrote :

Has the behavior of update manager changed? Here's my experience with it:

During normal use, update-manager uses the proxy set in Synaptic. During the upgrade to a new Ubuntu release, update-manager does not use the proxy set in Synaptic. It uses it initially (e.g the download of hardy.tar.gz.gpg) but once it begins downloading packages it does not. To use the proxy, I had to add it to apt.conf

Revision history for this message
David Robert Lewis (afrodeity) wrote :

Extremely annoying, irritating and time-wasting bug that should be fixed as an update in Hardy. I don't see any reason to perpetuate the suffering of users who expect at least a smoother ride with update manager than the one they are getting. Can't believe that setting the environment variable doesn't affect update manager which exists as a thing unto itself. How is this possilble? Bad bug, bad bug, please somebody fix it.

Revision history for this message
Kaushalya (kau-mad) wrote :

This bug wasted a whole day. It is not fixed in 8.10. I've changed network proxy as direct connection. But update-manager tries to connect to a proxy which was configured earlier, and says it can't connect to the internet.
 Seems this bug has existed years. Please somebody fix it.

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