Comment # 3 on bug 902359 from Ville Koskinen

Adding proxy profile support to YAST would save me some effort, so I'm all for
it.

Proxy autoconfiguration in web browsers is fine and solves a part of the
problem, but it doesn't help with command-line tools (like zypper and wget) or
other X applications. The workaround you suggest for shell sessions is actually
a good idea and I'll make use of it. 

I wonder if it would be possible to use something like libproxy
(https://code.google.com/p/libproxy/) in /etc/profile.d, so that shell sessions
would use the same autoconfiguration mechanism? That still doesn't solve the
whole problem; e.g. X applications run from within X without libproxy or
autoconfiguration support would still use the http_proxy environment variable,
and if the network doesn't support PAC, you would still need to set http_proxy
manually.