Cannot operate through a proxy

[JPvRiel]

Looks like a well written tool, but not designed to deal with a proxy use case? I.e. assumes open internet access?

With my http_proxy env variables set, it failed to work

$ apt-select
Getting list of mirrors...done.
Testing latency to mirror(s)
[0/3] 0%    connection to ubuntu.mirror.neology.co.za: timed out
[1/3] 33%   connection to ftp.leg.uct.ac.za: timed out
[2/3] 66%   connection to archive.ubuntu.com: timed out
[3/3] 100%
Cannot connect to any mirrors in ['http://ubuntu.mirror.neology.co.za/ubuntu/', 'http://ftp.leg.uct.ac.za/ubuntu/', 'http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/']

the problem is that in mirrors.py, the __tcp_ping() function cannot work via an HTTP proxy.

So this would entail quite a bit of rework.

• detect if using a proxy
• skip or implement an alternate measure of RTT through HTTP proxy
• simplest may be to skip RTT testing if we use a proxy and rank purely based on bandwidth tests?

(If I find some spare time, I'll try hack at it and submit a PR)

[jblakeman]

I've proposed in #46 that the latency testing be moved from TCP sockets to using HTTP and FTP connections. I haven't tested these methods behind a proxy yet, but plan to do so as I'm guessing it will solve this issue.

[martin68]

@JPvRiel Someone told me it is a pity that apt-select does not support proxy setting. Since this issue is open for 3 years without a fix, if you want proxy support you can try my similar project: https://github.com/martin68/apt-smart which uses urlopen method in The Python Standard Library, you can set Environment Variables to make apt-smart connect via HTTP proxy, e.g. in terminal type:
export {http,https,ftp}_proxy='http://user:[email protected]:1080'
These will not persist however (no longer active after you close the terminal), so you may wish to add the line to your ~/.bashrc"