Re: [OFF-TOPIC] Why not wget?

[William Ahern <william@...>]

On Tue, Mar 05, 2013 at 10:09:30AM +0200, Dirk Laurie wrote:
> 2013/3/4 William Ahern <william@25thandclement.com>:
> 
> > Unfortunately wget is far from universally available.
> 
> Well, for servers with their own specialized protocol, which do not
> expose their public filesystem, one can understand that. But why should
> any server that supports sftp refuse wget? Obsolete software, OK, any
> othe reason?

I don't know what you mean by "refusing". Many servers simply just don't
have it installed--it's not installed natively and there's no reason to
bother installing it.

None of FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, OS X, or Solaris ship with wget. The
former all natively come with an ftp(1) utility capable of fetching files
over HTTP from the command-line, while Solaris ships curl for it's package
management system. (I think OS X also ships with curl in addition to BSD
ftp(1).)

I'm not even sure all Linux systems install wget by default.

I was simply pointing out that one can get rid of an unnecessary dependency
and make things work without hassle on the majority of *nix systems by not
presuming that wget is available. As I've shown, it's trivial to support the
alternatives.

I don't dislike wget. I personally know one of the maintainers. And I know
that he would appreciate portability issues like this at least as much as
I do.