bsd.port.mk FETCH_ARGS defaults, why "-A" ?

[John Marino]

On 12/28/2013 01:56, Baptiste Daroussin wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 28, 2013 at 01:52:45AM +0100, John Marino wrote:
>> On 12/28/2013 01:49, Dimitry Andric wrote:
>>> On 28 Dec 2013, at 01:12, John Marino <freebsd.contact at marino.st> wrote:
>>>> For months I've been getting a lot of fetch failures in ports that I
>>>> couldn't reproduce outside of them.  It appears it is caused by the
>>>> default "-A" passed to fetch.
>>>>
>>>> For example, /usr/ports/emulators/javatari will fail with "make fetch"
>>>> but it will succeed with with "make fetch FETCH_ARGS=-Fpr"
>>>>
>>>> I'd like to understand why "-A" is the default.  Clearly many distfiles
>>>> could be retrieved that aren't, so I'd like to know what -A is saving us
>>>> from, and why that would be worse than the current situation?
>>>
>>> Crappy download sites that redirect you to ad pages, malware domains, or worse?
>>>
>>
>> And?
>> The checksum won't match, and the next site in the MASTER_SITES list
>> will be checked, right?  What is the downside of this redirect?  Keep in
>> mind that the site was once "approved" by the port maintainer, it's not
>> some random URL stuck in a wiki.
> 
> That's to avoid infinite loop on redirection

Does not "fetch" detect too many redirects?
What about the "emulators/javatari" case?  Do we really want that to
fetch to fail on a valid url?
My gut tells me the current fetch setup is not ideal and it can (and
should) be improved.  Any ideas (assuming -A really has a fatal case, of
which I'm not convinced since I can't envision how this infinite
redirection would occur)

John