[Patch] New option --http-proxy

[Christian Biere]

Werner Koch wrote:
> There is a standard way to define a PROXY, used by many programs and
> we would add confusion when adding a second way of doing that.

Ok, maybe there's a way to make this option less confusing:

"keyserver-option http-proxy" would imply "use $http_proxy"

and

"keyserver-option http-proxy=http://proxy/" would allow to use
an explicitly given URL.

> A proxy belongs to your network configuration and a program should play
> that setting.  With an additional way of setting the proxy, you are
> required to change the proxy address at several places - that is bad
> for system admistration.

I agree partially. However, there dozens of programs which already
have their own network configuration methods. In the concerned
environment, http_proxy is unset. Not all programs might play well
with the proxy, so we don't want to change that without a very good
reason. The proxy doesn't serve request for the local domain, so just
setting http_proxy isn't a complete configuration and the programs
(mostly web browsers) have to be configured to not use the proxy
for the local domain anyways.
Also, for non-unix users http_proxy is probably only used in the
context of gpg and a "normal" option would be more straight-
forward for them.

> Regarding your patches, we can't use them without a copyright
> assignment.

I assumed patches are covered by the same license as the files to
be patched. If that's not the case, I declare this rule for my
patches with this statement.

-- 
Christian
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