[darcs-devel] darcs patch - remove libcurl dependency

[Thorkil Naur]

Hello,

On Thursday 14 June 2007 21:16, Eric Y. Kow wrote:
> ...
> On Thu, Jun 14, 2007 at 10:18:26 +0200, Thorkil Naur wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> Would the loss of this functionality be acceptable if darcs had some
> kind of extra verbose mode, where it printed out all the patches it was
> trying to get? Or would calling wget still be useful/more flexible for
> other reasons?
> ...

In case of something still as brittle as Internet connectivity, I would always 
be careful not to limit my options needlessly. Clearly, in this case, darcs 
was fortunate enough to be able to play a major role when debugging my 
Internet connection, but I certainly don't mean to imply that darcs (or any 
other program that simply uses the Internet for its purposes) should include 
all sorts of network debugging mechanisms.

Printing the names of patches (and other files downloaded) would be useful if 
it was clear and known that what was happening was a combined operation of 
downloading a sequence of files. This may be the case, I don't know.

The difference between darcs using libcurl and darcs using wget was that I was 
able (using the error message from darcs on my killing the process that was 
running wget) to see the name of the file involved. With darcs using libcurl, 
I had to kill darcs itself, generating no messages or other indications of 
what it was doing.

Summarizing, I don't think you should let this particular problem enter your 
considerations with any significant weight. But I do believe that you should 
retain working and useful options in this area. This is also what seems to be 
the direction that this matter is taking.

Thanks and best regards
Thorkil