Hi
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...
As I understand it Ganesh is going to send a patch, so you can thank him.
I will indeed :-)
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.
Just consulting the right env var is easy. That's what Ganesh is going to do.
Presumably your problem is that your proxy changes frequently, so you'd have to keep updating this env var. I don't think wget does anything special beyond consulting the http_proxy/HTTP_PROXY env vars.
No, the proxy servers are unlikely to ever change. The problem is that many programs (Cabal included) use the proxy settings from IE. For some of these programs, we reach different proxy servers depending on whether we are working over VPN or directly connected to the network - changing the IE settings breaks this. It's also easier not to get the user to change their proxy settings, which complicates the setup instructions. Thanks Neil