Use busybox wget for downloading on Windows

[simonbyrne]

So it turns out that we still bundle busybox on Windows installations. Should we use busybox wget instead for downloading? This would solve the problem of needing to instal WMF 3 on Windows 7 (if you're still using Win 7, you're probably in a corporate environment where you can't do that).

(discovered in JuliaPackaging/BinaryProvider.jl#132)

[staticfloat]

I seem to remember this being a no-no; something about busybox wget being very unreliable (it didn't obey corporate proxy rules, perhaps?). But I am not a first-hand source of that knowledge, it was someone else telling me it, so I don't know how true it is. We could try it.

[simonbyrne]

Not sure. We could fall back on busybox if powershell doesn't work?

That said, I think BinaryProvider is the main problem, since that is the one that breaks package installation. Once we fix that, we might be better off focusing on #27043 instead of the existing Base.download.

[musm]

Why not use curl https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/virtualization/2017/12/19/tar-and-curl-come-to-windows/

Here are the windows compatible binaries https://curl.haxx.se/windows/ roughly ~3mb

[simonbyrne]

We would have to bundle it.

[musm]

Currently is seems busybox is used only for testing julia... which begs the question why it's even bundled for julia binary distributions.

We would have to bundle it.

Are you opposed to bundling curl?

[simonbyrne]

I'm not, but that would perhaps be better discussed in #27043.

[musm]

I think we should close this, since we no longer ship busybox with julia and I think their are better ways to solve the original issue.

On newer Windows builds we use the system shipped curl.exe if available, which avoids the original issue in this thread. Longer term we can chose to improve functionality of download (perhaps also by shipping curl for all distributions, even those where it's not available system wide, but not necessarily).

[simonbyrne]

Closing this as no Downloads.jl is now a stdlib.