Bad failure mode for lhapdf update if wget is not installed
Unless I'm misunderstanding something lhapdf update
internally uses wget to fetch an index file. I am using LHAPDF inside a Docker container. Notably the Ubuntu Docker images do not have wget installed by default. Running lhapdf update
then results in the following error message:
Unable to download from any of ['/cvmfs/sft.cern.ch/lcg/external/lhapdfsets/current/pdfsets.index', 'http://lhapdfsets.web.cern.ch/lhapdfsets/current/pdfsets.index']
The issue can be fixed by simply installing wget. However, the error message is rather unhelpful for figuring this out. I would therefore suggest an explicit check for whether wget is installed and to print an appropriate error message if it is not.