Well, that didn't take long: within a week of applause for Microsoft's decision to open-source PowerShell, a comment-war has broken out over
curl
andwget
.For those not familiar with these commands: they're open source command line tools for fetching Internet content without a browser. Apart from obvious applications like downloading whole sites (for example as backup), they're also under the hood for a lot of other toolsets (an example the author is familiar with – GIS tools use
curl
and/orwget
to fetch maps from Web services).For some reason, Microsoft's team decided to put aliases for
curl
andwget
in Windows PowerShell – but, as this thread begins, those aliases don't delivercurl
andwget
functionality.The pull request says the aliases should be spiked: "They block use of the commonly used command line tools without providing even an attempt to offer the same functionality. They serve no purpose for PowerShell users but cause confusion and problems to existing
curl
andwget
users."
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 23 2016, @09:08PM
I agree that if Microsoft had properly implemented wget and curl, with rigorous compatibility testing, there would be no issue. Anyone should be able to implement those commands.
The problem is that they couldn't be bothered doing that.