SoylentNews

Your wget (and curl) is Broken and Should DIE, GitHubbers Tell Microsoft

posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday August 23 2016, @10:58AM   
from the parts-of-the-basic-toolset dept.

"exec" writes:

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 and wget.

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/or wget to fetch maps from Web services).

For some reason, Microsoft's team decided to put aliases for curl and wget in Windows PowerShell – but, as this thread begins, those aliases don't deliver curl and wget 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 and wget users."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/23/your_wget_is_broken_and_should_die_powershellers_tell_microsoft/

-- submitted from IRC

---

Original Submission

• Re:''reference specific comments in the[...]thread(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 24 2016, @05:58PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 24 2016, @05:58PM (#392692)

  Yeah, the method I described -should- work, even on pages when there is no obvious thing to click (in this case, the date within each post).

  We should note here that some page "developers"[1] don't understand the concept of accessibility[2] and especially not the concept of a #FragmentIdentifier.

  In the article which spawned one of my recent submissions [soylentnews.org] I found one of those.
  In those cases, I add a critique to the URL [insidehighered.com]
  (and the editors typically remove those).

  [1] ...and a bunch of those "developers" just reuse someone else's page boilerplate without understanding what the tags within it do.

  [2] Folks who are blind and use a text-to-audio screenreader as well as folks who use a text-only browser really hate those poorly-educated guys.
  (The very first thing on any page that doesn't start its main content at the very top of the page should be a Jump to content link.)
  Note: I have special emotions for the guys who include one of those--and don't check to see that it actually WORKS.

  -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

  Parent