It is somewhat lighter, faster and simpler than wget. It is as common
as wget these days... from GnuPG to Git and Gimp, they all depend on
it, and we all have it installed.
The widget uses 'wget' to grab the information. The Lua socket library
would be nicer, of course, but let's not introduce external libraries
at this point. Wget will write to stdout with a timeout of 5s. This
has the potential to block everything else in case of problems... But
let's not introduce temporary files at this point. Besides having to
handle files, operations while running on battery power are to be
avoided.
Adrian C. (anrxc)