[darcs-devel] darcs patch - remove libcurl dependency

[Thorkil Naur]

Hello,

This is in response to

  http://lists.osuosl.org/pipermail/darcs-devel/2007-June/005806.html

where it is said:

Eric Y. Kow eric.kow at gmail.com Wed Jun 13 23:22:24 PDT 2007 :
> ...
> Overall, this patch gets rid of things, which I tend to favour.
> Note that we lose the ability to call wget/curl.  Before, it
> was not obligatory for to have libcurl to build darcs; now it
> is necessary to have HTTP.  On the other hand, this new requirement
> seems fair enough.  I have no objections.
> ...

I have just had several weeks of strangely disrupted Internet connectivity at 
my home: Apparently, a data-dependent error caused the download of a few 
specific files to get "stuck". And one of the files that were hit by this 
problem was one of the GHC repository inventory files, so this caused my 
nightly builds of GHC to suddenly fail consistently.

One of the things I did to attempt to diagnose the problem was to re-build 
darcs to use wget instead of libcurl (thanks to Malcolm Wallace for this 
idea). This brought the name of the failing file into the open and allowed me 
to reproduce the problem using direct wget calls, curl or any of a number of 
ordinary browsers. With libcurl, darcs simply stopped running, stuck, with no 
error messages or other indications of what it was doing.

I believe that my ability to do this was important to convince my ISP to look 
hard at this problem. So I would suggest such events to be taken into 
consideration when deciding whether alternative means of communicating should 
be retained.

Best regards
Thorkil