OMG this is the craziest idea ever! What will I ever do without being able to use wget!?!?

OK, enough sarcasm. I am behind this as long as we can reasonably address the fallout from people using the external downloader in perhaps somewhat unconventional fashion. This isn't to say it will be a perfect solution, but currently we are having to hack around all too much with supporting a similiar-interfaced internal and external option, which just isn't practical. Something like git doesn't let you plug in a different download option; we should be able to make our code handle 99% of the reasons people use an external download tool.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Improve_Pacman_Performance proposes 7 different downloaders to use with XferCommand

The first implementation of xdelta used XferCommand too : http://archlinux.2023198.n4.nabble.com/pacman-xdelta-using-XferCommand-td2053686.html
on which phrakture replied : 'Ya know, the XferCommand is near genius 8)'
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=238666#p238666

I am just playing the devil's advocate, so that you're ready to confront XferCommand fans. I never ever used XferCommand myself.

You could also tell people to implement XferCommand inside libcurl, ahahah.

Do you expect folks to come here to discuss this? I always thought the bugtracker isn't suited for discussion - the forums are.
Dave Reisner (falconindy), are you going to open a thread about this on the forums?

The forums are not an appropriate place for this, it descends into madness. Discussion for pacman affairs should happen on the pacman mailing list as always.

OK, but will anyone provide a heads-up for those who don't read the bugtracker and ML on a regular basis that such discussion is taking place?
I'm not saying you have to ... :-)

Do you want to investigate why was 'XferCommand = wget %u' needed https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=972312#p972312 ?

Not really the kind of use case we're looking at. If that were libcurl, I'd be talking to upstream about a bugfix.

Please see  FS#25532  and  FS#25531  for the reasons why I use an external downloader.

Again, not what we're looking for. Please provide _use_ _cases_ and not bug reports.

The corresponding use cases are:
a) Having a slow internet connection, you might want to download updates overnight ("pacman -Syuw"), and want them to be all there in the morning.
b) Having an _unreliable_ internet connection, you might want to resume your downloads instead of downloading all over and hoping that your connection holds.
These correspond to  FS#25532  and  FS#25531 , respectively.
While b is more of a bug than a is, these two prohibit people (like me) from using the internal downloader.

Once the internal downloader can do these, I'd be happy to use it.

[Edit] I think I might have misunderstood you.
What I was pointing out where use cases where you can't _yet_ use the internal downloader.
I think you wanted cases where you _needed_ an external tool.
If that is the case, feel free to ignore my comments [/Edit]

In my experience, the internal downloader is *very* intolerant to flaky networks. So for people who are regularly/always on bad networks, the XferCommand with something like aria2c or wget is a boon.

On the other hand, if you are occasionaly having network problems, printing the download links with --print, and downloading those with your favourite download manager is an option (it's what I do, at least).

I use a wget XferCommand because of this: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Repo-ck#Downloads_interrupt_regularly

Next pacman release will have a new configuration / command line option:
https://git.archlinux.org/pacman.git/commit/?id=c635f185ba86967cd8de9c31890b57e558f65e9b