Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make
Ubuntu better.

I understand why you expected apt-key and add-apt-repository to use the
proxy you defined with Acquire::http::proxy in /etc/apt. But I'm not
sure this is the only interpretation.

I expect "Acquire::http::proxy" to define the proxy for the apt
repository itself. But apt-key and add-apt-repository don't actually
access apt repositories at all - they access other metadata sources to
set apt up instead. When configuring an "apt proxy", I might have even
denied access to everything except to apt repositories themselves, and
so apt-key and add-apt-repository wouldn't work in this case anyway.

Instead, I'd expect http_proxy and https_proxy environment variables to
be used instead for these tools. But I believe (this needs to be
checked) that add-apt-repository will need https to access Launchpad,
and both tools need keyserver access which can't easily be proxied (they
access a port most proxies wouldn't allow).

> The long time this issue has been standing and has affected people

Any difficulty with using add-apt-repository and/or apt-key via a proxy
- reasonable. But that Acquire::http::proxy didn't configure apt-key and
add-apt-repository - I'm not convinced, for reasons above. This is the
first bug that I'm aware of that has mentioned this.

I understand the need to for proxy support for these tools for
environments where direct access cannot be permitted. Maybe in this case
only a socks proxy would do.

In any case, I think further discussion is needed, and piecemeal fixes
will exacerbate the problem by adding confusion. I think this needs to
be a blueprint-level item to fix behind-firewall-proxy-access for
standard server/Openstack deployments that covers all use cases (cloud
images, apt, keyserver, utilities like add-apt-repository) in a standard
way.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1433761

Title:
  apt-key and add-apt-repository don't honor Acquire::http::Proxy

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