On Tue, 29 Apr 2008 00:32:59 -0400 "Shai Gluskin" shai@content2zero.com wrote:
I'm still curious. Of course it is less urgent now that curl is working for me. And based on the handbook page that you sent me to, the curl way seems to be more of a best practice.
Drupal is mainly written to have a web interface. There are cookies, POST, GET, authentication, REFERER. You can expect that the efforts will be put into making it work from the web and running cron.php from the cli may have unexpected result.
That doesn't mean it couldn't have a cli interface (I think there is a cli interface for drupal admin but it still rely on HTTP)... that just mean I doubt it is something I'd rely on.
I don't think people will put stuff in cron that will redirect, use javascript, expect to see on the other side a "regular" full-fledged browser... but still it would be a conservative choice to put on the other side the smaller thing that resemble a browser if you're not so tight on resources. You could even write a telnet script, use netcat whatever... but life is complicated enough by itself: wget, curl, links etc will mostly do the trick for a reasonably long foreseeable future.