pkgsrc vs. https-only master sites

[Tobias Nygren <tnn%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

Hi,

The problem of master sites redirecting to https or only providing
https is growing and I think we need to make pkgsrc deal with this
better than it does now. As you are probably aware base ftp(1) on
NetBSD < 7 does not support https URLs.

Having only MASTER_SITE_BACKUP is both fragile and annoying. When a
package has recently updated and no mirrored distfile is available yet
the user has a bad experience.

One way to fix this would be to remove the SSL option from
pkgsrc/net/tnftp and always build it with SSL. Then we could depend
on it if the download URL has https.
This does not solve the problem of http->https 301 redirects though.
So maybe we need to unconditionally pull in an SSL aware fetch tool
from pkgsrc if base does not provide one.

Thoughts on this?

Kind regards,
-Tobias