I have used wget very successfully as a replacement for ftp.
The firewall I am behind would cause ftp to silently fail
sometimes --- very frustrating...

I also add another target to my Makefiles which tests all files
(presumably they are .z or .gz only) and removes defective ones,
and refetches!  This could certainly be enhanced!


# for the first get, use this since it is reliable and will retry when the
# connection is broken, whereas the default ftp can fail silently. On wget,
# may need http:// instead of ftp://, maybe not.

FETCH_CMD=     wget
#MASTER_SITE_OVERRIDE=

rm_and_refetch_bad:
.for __i__ in ${DISTFILES}
        @${GZIP_CMD} -dc ${DISTDIR}/${__i__} > //dev/null || ${RM} -f ${DISTDIR}/${__i__}
.endfor
        @make fetch

.include "../../mk/bsd.pkg.mk"