[tex-live] TeXLive-2018 fails to update across firewall

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2018-06-21 at 08:51:06 +0900, Norbert Preining wrote:

 >> Can you please make an option for the user to force using the
 >> system-provided wget? Pretty-please?
 > 
 > What for? On Mac it will probably never hit wget anymore. With the
 > latest update you included, the logic is now
 >   - by default try LWP
 >   - if that fails and curl is available, try curl
 >   - if that fails, use wget
 > Now since curl is always available on MacOS, I guess that wget will
 > never be used on.

I thought that the wget binaries shipped with TeX Live are only for
systems which don't provide wget by themselves (Windows, OS X, BSD).   

Given that almost(?) all systems provide either curl and wget it's
probably best to rely on them and revert to the wget binaries shipped
with TeX Live only iff neither curl nor wget is in PATH:

  - by default try LWP
  - if that fails and curl is available, try curl
  - if that fails and wget is available, try wget
  - if that fails, use wget provided by TeX Live
  
Because most Unix/Linux package managers depend on either curl or wget
I suppose that these programs are properly configured, support https,
and that the wget binaries shipped with TL are then used in very rare
cases only, if at all.

On all systems except Windows we expect a working Perl installation.
Can't we expect similarly that either a working curl or wget is
present and use the TL binaries only as a last resort (if neither
curl nor wget is in PATH)?

Regards,
  Reinhard

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