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I use a cacheing web proxy to make my life suck a tiny bit less. I use it in my browser, and I export it as an environment variable. This works well. All kinds of tools get accelerated. ( Well, really I export it as two environment variables, HTTP_PROXY and http_proxy, because it seems people were various kinds of stupid at various times. Oh well. ) Now, apt (a package tool), from debian supports http proxies. Handy, since apt sometimes loses its mind and I have to manually delete its package cache to force it to download them again. So it can regain its mind faster. Unfortunately, apt does not support http cacheing properly. It cannot arrange to reliably discover when tiles provided by the standard package repositories have changed. The result is apt-get update (find out about new packages) often acquires a patchwork of mismatched old and new files. This causes it to complains about md5sums not matching. Ye olde apt-get update hate: when `apt-get update' fails, it suggests to fix this by running `apt-get update'. This invariably produces the same error in a slightly different configuration. I wish all software was so helpful: "An error has occurred. To fix this, please do exactly what you just did again." Net result, `apt-get update' fails around 50% of the time (who knows what the factors are). I would prefer it to work 100% of the time. Since its support for caching proxies is broken, I would like to ask it not to use a cacheing proxy. Looking at the configfile documentation: blah blah blah all about proxy settings for http written in confusing language... Then clarity: The http_proxy environment variable will override all settings. When there is a conflict between program-specific settings, and a program-general setting, ignore the program-specific settings. Right. Okay, so I cannot configure apt not to screw up. I have to remove the environment variable before invoking apt-get. Well, how will I do this? apt-get is indirectly invoked by various tools, so making my own shellscript to run it is not going to work. I could replace apt-get with a shellscript that invokes apt-get after removing the environment variable, but this will be transparently re-broken on upgrade. I guess I will simply have to manually remove both environment variables before launching whatever tool that might invoke apt-get. And then put them back. -josh
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