[tex-live] MacTex Bug: wget.x86_64-darwin is missing HTTPS support

[Mojca Miklavec]

On 18 May 2018 at 06:24, Norbert Preining wrote:
>> At least for the mac (and probably many *BSD) users it would probably
>> be really nice if curl was supported out of the box. Then we would get
>> the same benefits as linux users who get the system wget without the
>> additional maintenance burden.
>
> Why? Is curl pre-installed on all macs? And does it support https out of
> the box?

Yes and yes, except on super old macs (which still ship curl, but do
not speak new standards).
New security standards (I forgot which version of what exactly)
require 10.8, released in 2012.

Note that MacTeX only supports 10.10 (10.12 since TL 2019) and legacy
binaries only support 10.7 out-of-the-box, so the only "deprived"
machine would be 10.7 from 2011.
I was recently playing with 10.5 (ppc) and there you are not even able
to browse normally because the default browser would not let you
access any page served over https. 10.7 does open some, but only if
they still allow the older TLS (or whatever that is) and most sites
switched that off (a lot of them in the last year, including GitHub,
SourceForge etc.).

So yes, using curl on mac should allow getting rid of wget altogether.

> I can look into it, but never got around the invocation concoction of
> curl ;-)

Same here :)

I know curl is always there, but wget is what I always install first
just because the curl's syntax is so weird.

Mojca