When running in CI we typically try to make sure that all resources retrieved over the network will be retrieved through the PHX proxy in order to limit the amount of requests going to the "real" internet. We typically do this in a blanket manner by setting the proxy in the 'http_proxy' environment variable.

'http_proxy' can affect repoman because it can affect anything that uses the 'requests' library.

We want to prevent going through the proxy for resources that are already in the PHX data center like those coming from resources.ovirt.org or from mirrors.phx.ovirt.org. It is possible to simply unset 'http_proxy' when running repoman, but some times we may have local and remote resources mixed in the same repoman run. Therefore we need the ability to tell repoman at the package-source, when to go through the proxy and when to not.

Note that 'yum' based tools have similar functionality, you can configure a global proxy setting, and then you can configure it on a per-repo basis.