Bug#446058: epiphany-browser: manual network proxy settings no longer honoured

[Jon Dowland]

Package: epiphany-browser
Version: 2.20.0-3
Severity: important

Since the move to 2.20.0-3, epiphany-browser cannot render
any "external" resources (pages on the Internet).

Attempting to do so results in one of

* no visual feedback apart from a brief
  flicker in the loadingbar at the  bottom: the page doesn't
  change from my home age (a page internal to my network); the
  URL bar doesn't change

* url bar updates but page is blank; loading bar flickers
  quickly as before but stops quick (i.e., it's not timing
  out)

In both cases nothing is echoed on stdout/stderr, no error
dialogues, etc.

I have to use a proxy to visit external resources.  I
specify http/https/sftp/socks separately in the gnome
network preferences thing.

If I specify an autoconfiguration URL, it works fine. If I
switch back to manual, it stops.

I need to use manual since the autoconfig url doesn't define
the socks proxy and non-web GNOME apps can't parse the
autoconfiguration url.

(I guess I should wishlist gnome to have a javascript
interpreter in core that parses the pac file and passes the
settings on to apps, mac-os x style :-) )

This unfortunately makes epiphany unusable for me, for now.

(It looks like gnome 2.20 made some changes to the way the
gconf keys are stored, I see lots of old_http_proxy,
old_ftp_proxy etc. keys now. hmm.)

Related packages:

ii  epiphany-browser                             2.20.0-3
ii  epiphany-browser-data                        2.20.0-3
ii  epiphany-browser-dev                         2.20.0-3
ii  epiphany-extensions                          2.20.0-1
ii  epiphany-gecko                               2.20.0-3
rc  epiphany-webkit                              2.20.0-3

I've just tried removing -webkit, and -extensions,
unfortunately no avail. I also removed ~/.gnome2/epiphany
on the off-chance.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.21-2-686 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages epiphany-browser depends on:
ii  epiphany-gecko                2.20.0-3   Intuitive GNOME web browser - Geck
ii  epiphany-webkit               2.20.0-3   Intuitive GNOME web browser - webk

epiphany-browser recommends no packages.

-- no debconf information