Currently git-annex uses wget and curl for downloading urls.
Which is used depends on the situation, since both have their limitations
and quirks.

This often confuses users, who expect annex.web-options to only apply
to whichever program git-annex was running, and put in an option that
breaks the other program. Or, configure a netrc file, which wget uses by
default, but curl does not.

Also, using these external programs avoids keeping a http connection open
and pipelining requests, so it makes mass url downloads a lot slower than
if git-annex used http-conduit to do url downloads itself. [[users/yoh]]
has requested http pipelining.

For file: ftp: and more unusual urls, http-conduit can't support them.
git-annex does support those urls, and people rely on that, so it would
still need to use wget or curl for those.

wget is also not shipped with git-annex on Windows or OSX, only curl is,
and it would be good to only use one of the programs, not both, when
handing those unusual urls.

See also, [[support_.netrc_for_fsck_--from_web]]. That some users rely on
git-annex using wget and a netrc file is kind of problimatic if switching
to http-conduit which does not support it. Maybe require users to set
`annex.web-download-command` if they want to make it use something that
supports netrc?

--[[Joey]]