usability: setting system-wide network proxies for all applications

Here's something I filed in Bugzilla back in June. Fixing this issue would make life easier for enterprise users, but it's not clear what exactly the solution would be. Should the proxy control be integrated into system-config-network, Sabayon, or somewhere else? ---https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=197371---------------------------------------- Description of problem: Imagine the scenario of a multi-computer office network, and each computer has multiple users. The office firewall does not allow direct port 80 access, so all web traffic must go through the web proxy. Setting the proxy for each application for each user on each computer can be tiring. Competition: In SUSE 10.1, Yast can configure a system wide proxy which affects (at least) Firefox, Gnome, KDE, and environment variables. Programs such as wget, links, and yum (on Fedora) obey the environment variables. In SUSE 10.1, OpenOffice.org's proxy setting is not affected (but it would be nice if it were). In Microsoft Windows, most applications obey the system proxy settings (Control Panel->Internet Options->Connections). ---https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=197371---------------------------------------- Recently, I thought about two other nuances. First, when yum runs as a service, (by default) it doesn't load environment variables from /etc/profile.d/*sh, which is a convenient place to setup proxy environment variables. Second, non-GUI Linux programs (unlike GUI web browsers, for example) support neither proxy auto-detection nor automatic configuration URLs. Andrew