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Almost quarter of a thousand. Yay! That does raise an interesting question though. If one wanted to create a command-line tool (or, rather, toolset) as compr

Almost quarter of a thousand. Yay! That does raise an interesting question though. If one wanted to create a command-line tool (or, rather, toolset) as comprehensive as curl, but with a much smaller API surface, how would they go about it? Sure, some of these flags are just shorthands, and some of them could be removed entirely (-o → stdout redirection), but that still leaves a lot of options.

mmh0000 4y ago
Ah. But -o is useful. What if I’m running curl directly without a shell (e.g. in a container). How else would I save the output to a file?
- thih9 4y ago
  wget ;)
  - bombcar 4y ago
    On some systems without wget I have to alias wget to curl -o or whatever it is.
pjc50 4y ago
How would you keep it there? You'd have to spend a lot of effort discouraging feature requests.
- danuker 4y ago
  You don't need to discourage them. Just ignore them. Perhaaps take a look at the most popular ones every now and then, but a free software project owes the world nothing.
  - thih9 4y ago
    In theory yes. In practice I assume (I have no practical experience) that as the project gets larger the number of involved parties grows. And suddenly you need to balance interests of not just you but also the community, contributors, large users, sponsors and possibly more.
tyingq 4y ago
Curl supports a lot of crazy stuff that adds command line options, like IMAP/LDAP/POP3/SMTP means adding --login-options, --mail-auth, --mail-from, --mail-rcpt-allowfails, --mail-rcpt. If you read the man page, you'll find other flags that aren't really central to a http(s) fetch tool, like ftp, tftp.
jrochkind1 4y ago
Curl is really really big on backwards compatibility, which I don't mean to critisize. If you were starting over from scratch even trying to make it curl-like, you could probably trim down the options substantially. The OP is in fact an example of a new option that can more-or-less cover the same functionality as some old options, plus more, but the old options remain.

mmh0000 4y ago

Ah. But -o is useful. What if I’m running curl directly without a shell (e.g. in a container). How else would I save the output to a file?

thih9 4y ago
wget ;)
- bombcar 4y ago
  On some systems without wget I have to alias wget to curl -o or whatever it is.

pjc50 4y ago

How would you keep it there? You'd have to spend a lot of effort discouraging feature requests.

danuker 4y ago
You don't need to discourage them. Just ignore them. Perhaaps take a look at the most popular ones every now and then, but a free software project owes the world nothing.
- thih9 4y ago
  In theory yes. In practice I assume (I have no practical experience) that as the project gets larger the number of involved parties grows. And suddenly you need to balance interests of not just you but also the community, contributors, large users, sponsors and possibly more.

tyingq 4y ago

Curl supports a lot of crazy stuff that adds command line options, like IMAP/LDAP/POP3/SMTP means adding --login-options, --mail-auth, --mail-from, --mail-rcpt-allowfails, --mail-rcpt. If you read the man page, you'll find other flags that aren't really central to a http(s) fetch tool, like ftp, tftp.

jrochkind1 4y ago

Curl is really really big on backwards compatibility, which I don't mean to critisize. If you were starting over from scratch even trying to make it curl-like, you could probably trim down the options substantially. The OP is in fact an example of a new option that can more-or-less cover the same functionality as some old options, plus more, but the old options remain.