Currently Tails includes and supports wget. I propose *also* adding support for 
curl.

Curl is widely-used and is the "go-to" tool for many people at the command line.
Thus, including it would make Tails more convenient for some. In addition,
enabling curl would make a number of added packages in Debian "just work",

I think it would be best to make curl part of the installation. Then it'd be 
immediately
available & it'd more obviously tested.
Curl and wget do some similar things, but each can do things the other can't,
and in any case many people & tools expect curl to be available.
Curl also isn't large compared to many other tools, e.g., libreoffice.
If there's no agreement on including curl by default,
please at *least* make curl "just work" when it's installed as a separate 
program.

In some brief testing, it appears this is all that's needed to make curl "just 
work":
export ALL_PROXY='socks5h://127.0.0.1:9050'

I don't see a need for 'torify' (which uses LD_PRELOAD to try to intercept 
requests).
The curl tool already knows about proxies and has many controls for them.
Using socks5h asks it to make DNS requests also go to the proxy. In short,
I *think* setting this in the default environment makes it curl "just work", as 
long
as when the user logs in the environment includes that setting (which is easy 
to cause).
If all it takes is setting an environment variable, then I think it's important 
to do that
by default, e.g., via /etc/environment.d or /etc/profile.d or similar.

I haven't seriously examined if ALL_PROXY works in special cases, e.g.,
with other intermediate proxies or with Tor bridges. Maybe there's
a problem with this approach, or a better way to make curl work on Tails.
But no matter what, I'd like curl to "just work" on Tails, and ideally 
available by default.

Discussion welcome!

--- David A. Wheeler

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