Proxies

[Neil Mitchell]

Hi Duncan,

>> I know that Cabal is currently looking very seriously at proxies etc,
>> but is there any way to override the proxies that Cabal uses on a
>> temporary basis? Many work environments have a fairly complex proxy
>> script that handles things like VPN correctly, and it would be nice to
>> override the Cabal proxy settings without changing them in IE.
>
> Ganesh has said the same thing. I'll accept a patch to have it consult
> the same env var as unix does, overriding what it would look up in the
> registry.

I seem to remember that only a couple of days ago you said you'd stop
asking Windows developers for patches :-)

I suspect Ganesh has very similar issues with going through a
corporate firewall, those things aren't fun! I doubt I'll have time to
look in to a patch, which is a real shame, since I suspect its not
that hard...

> I looked into using the info in the registry properly but it turns out
> to be more than a little difficult, requiring a javascript interpreter
> or linking to the MS HTTP library (which seems to need support in
> ghc/cabal for linking to assemblies).

Yeah, the HTTP proxy thing sucks, its unfortunate... However, surely
one of the libraries on hackage should do it? And if one doesn't, one
should be written? It seems like critical (if not highly annoying)
functionality for Windows.

Another alternative would be to have a flag to get Cabal to use wget
for downloading, since wget can be set up with environment variables
for proxies and absolutely every other configuration setting
imaginable - so you don't have to keep tweaking in response to bizarre
proxy servers.

Thanks

Neil