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

[John Marino]

On 12/28/2013 02:27, Baptiste Daroussin wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 28, 2013 at 02:05:31AM +0100, Michael Gmelin wrote:
>> On Sat, 28 Dec 2013 01:56:22 +0100
>> Baptiste Daroussin <bapt at FreeBSD.org> 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
>>>
>>> bapt
>>
>> libfetch allows a maximum um five redirects and the -A flag is
>> implemented in terms of limiting this to one:
>>
>> http.c:
>> ...
>> /* Maximum number of redirects to follow */
>> #define MAX_REDIRECT 5
>> ...
>>   /* if the A flag is set, we only get one try */
>>   n = noredirect ? 1 : MAX_REDIRECT;
>>   i = 0;
>> ...
>>
> 
> Great so that s not an argument anymore, it was the argument I was told 2 years
> ago when I proposed to remove the -A
> 

Does that mean that "-A" option will be removed in the near future?  As
Doug indicated, there doesn't seem to be any current reason to have it
and sufficient reason not to have it.

John