My suggestion - if the personality disorder is built into the specific
proxy product (as opposed to having been placed there somehow by the
proxy administrator), get the product and version number, and add a
passing comment to the "-U" documentation that says "for proxy server
XYZ, you may find you need to use -u instead of -U, and here's a simple
way (using curl) to verify this behavior".

I agree that it's quite an abnormal configuration, however if you're the
un-knowing end-user of this proxy, that someone else setup and maintains
on your corporate network, it would be nice to have at least one line in
the curl docs mentioning what the problem might be and how to fix it.

My $0.02...
--Kevin

-----Original Message-----
From: Daniel Stenberg [mailto:daniel_at_haxx.se]
Sent: Monday, November 05, 2001 8:17 AM
To: Curl Mailinglist
Cc: Domenico Andreoli
Subject: Bug#114228 (was Re: ANNOUNCE: curl and libcurl 7.9.1)

On Mon, 5 Nov 2001, Domenico Andreoli wrote:

> sorry to ask you, i'm not following this ml so well, can you tell me
if
> the issue with bug titled "Bug#114228: libcurl-dev: Proxy support
> documentation misleading" has been solved with release 7.9.1?

I don't blame you, we (Dirk Eddelbuettel, who reported this problem, and
I)
dealt with this issue mainly in private correspondation.

Has it been solved? Well, to be honest, I'm not sure what the correct
way to
handle this would be! I have not taken any particular action to change
anything (yet). I'm ready to hear your suggestions.

Let me explain to you (plural) what this "bug" is all about (in my view,
others may think differently):

Dirk's proxy has a personality disorder! It thinks it is a HTTP server,
and
thus it requires a normal HTTP server authentication header. Normal
proxies
use a certain "http proxy" header for authentication, but Dirk's proxy
doesn't.

There is nothing in the curl docs that mentions this possbility and
that's
what his issue is all about (as the normal -U option doesn't work with
his
proxy). I consider this case an abomination, that goes beyond what needs
to
be documented.

I'll keep the right of being wrong. But unless proven so, I think I'm
right!

-- 
    Daniel Stenberg -- curl groks URLs -- http://curl.haxx.se/