Daniel,
I apologize if I hurt your feeling about curl. Last summer I had to download several 10Gb+ files and I tried to use curl and ncftp. After a day or so of work curl was stopping, freezing forever and I was unable to force it to retry and to resume. Maybe I misused curl, did not understand documentation or I am a stupid guy. The bottom line is I was unable to download the data. I had a dilemma to order the tapes and pay out of my pocket several hundred bucks or to patch wget.
So I had an impression that if you have an unstable connection (and I do, and majority of users do), which is dropping many times during download, there is no alternative as to use wget. The longer the file, the longer download time, the greater probability that the connection will be lost. Yes, you are right, this mailing list is not about curl, but IMHO the main virtue of wget with respect a myriad of other clients, including curl, is that it works reliably at extremely lousy and unreliable networks.
Leonid
