[pca] Plain "wget" giving me an error.

[Martin Paul]

Rajiv Gunja wrote:
> I have been using PCA for so long that I have forgotten the real command/URL
> which downloads the patches and can't seem to find my notes.

Welcome to a world of pain! Using pca has the advantage that it hides 
the complexity of this seemingly simple task.

I don't understand the full details, but I'll try to summarize:

sunsolve.sun.com doesn't ask explicitely for authentication data on the 
HTTP protocol level. Either you send the login/password without being 
asked, or you will be presented with an HTML page asking you to login 
(which doesn't work with wget, of course).

Everything was fine until wget was changed with version 1.11. In that 
version, it only sends authentication if it is asked for it. So wget 
v1.11 didn't work with sunsolve anymore. I reported the problem to the 
wget maintainers, who then added a new option "--auth-no-challenge" to 
wget 1.11.1 which simulates the old behaviour.

This is a complete mess, and I really didn't want to handle three 
different cases depending on the wget version in pca. So what I'm doing 
now is to encode the user/passwd information and sending it via wget's 
--header ("Authorization: Basic") option. Like this, authentication data 
is forced upon SunSolve with every version of wget.

If you use wget yourself, you have to act accordingly, depending on the 
wget version (if possible, update to >=1.11.1 and use the new option). 
HTTP or HTTPS doesn't matter, both work (or don't, with the wrong options).

This is probably the reason why something that has worked for you before 
doesn't work anymore.

Hope that helps,

Martin.