freebsd-update: fetch or phttpget?

[RW]

On Mon, 11 Nov 2013 14:18:08 +0100
Luca Ferrari wrote:

> Hi all,
> I noted that freebsd-update uses phttpget as main downloader except in
> a point, where fetch(1) is used:
> 
> fetch ${QUIETFLAG} http://${SERVERNAME}/${FETCHDIR}/latest.ssl
> 
> Now, this causes problems with the authentication when behind  a
> proxy, since phttpget and fetch seem to use a different approach to
> username/password authentication. In particular fetch handles an
> http_proxy variable that includes username/password, while phttpget
> does not.
> What is the rationale behind the usage of two downloader within the
> same script?


phttpget is very basic, but does support http pipelining, so it's much
faster downloading a lot of small files - in the script  phttpget is
always used with xargs. fetch is used for individual files, it has more
features and better error reporting.