Why GNUnet prefers curl over wget2

[hyazinthe]

Hello GNU fellows,

I'm an associate of another project, which is part of GNU: GNUnet - 
https://www.gnunet.org/en/

Yesterday on the mailinglist of the GNUnet developers - 
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnunet-developers/2022-09/msg00034.html - a 
question was raised, which certainly is of interest for you:
> On 7. Sep 2022, at 15:46, madmurphy <madmurphy333@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I don't know all the reasons behind using curl and all GNUnet's requirements,
> but have you guys thought about switching to wget2? It is a GNU package and
> has a nice library (libwget). It supports GNU TLS natively, it is supposed to
> download faster than curl, and if a minor feature is missing it might be an
> opportunity to make libwget grow.
>
> A comparison table (by curl):
>
> https://curl.se/docs/comparison-table.html
>
> --madmurphy

The answer:
> On Wed, Sep 7, 2022 at 2:54 PM Schanzenbach, Martin <mschanzenbach@posteo.de> 
> wrote:
>
> We need a non-blocking API such as curl_multi.
> Last time I checked, libwget2 does not have that.
>
> BR

Back and forth with details:
(1/2)
> On 7. Sep 2022, at 16:28, madmurphy <madmurphy333@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I never used the curl API, so I don't know what the multi interface is, but
> if I remember correctly wget2 introduced non-blocking sockets. That's all I
> know. I did not find a lot of info on Google, except maybe for this email on
> gnutls mailing list:
> https://lists.gnutls.org/pipermail/gnutls-devel/2019-June/014051.html
>
> --madmurphy

(2/2)
> On Wed, Sep 7, 2022 at 3:47 PM Schanzenbach, Martin <mschanzenbach@posteo.de> 
> wrote:
>
> Imagine that a "GET /download" downloads 1GB of data.
> If your code looks like this (not the actual API but for demonstration
> purposes):
>
> data = wget_get("/download")
> // Wait until download completes
>
> Then you have a blocking API.
>
> Instead you can have a non-blocking API that allows you to "select" or "epoll"
> file descriptors of the download.
> See https://curl.se/libcurl/c/libcurl-multi.html

I'd rather like to see GNUnet switch to wget2.
Just alone because wget2's licensing goes stronger in direction of copyleft and 
libre computing:
"It is licensed under the GPL-3.0-or-later license, and is wrapped around 
Libwget which is under the LGPL-3.0-or-later license." - 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wget#Wget2

So, take this hint as a suggestion for improvement, a feature request.
As soon as functional barrier mentioned in cited conversation is overcome by 
wget2, be sure within GNUnet project I will be advocating the switch to wget2.


Greetings,
Bastian Schmidt