that doesn't quite work in the presence of authenticating proxies.

There's a proxy/url library out there that's used by some of the install-scripts that assumes the proxy url is
http://host:port/...
so when presented with
http://username:password@host:port/...
splits it at the first : and complains that password@host:port isn't a sane port number.

This lands you with broken installs that you can't remove. :-(

maybe hardy will contain a fixed version of the library/util.

cheers,
T.