Giuseppe et al., I suggest making unknown .wgetrc directives a warning (and just ignore them, proceeding on normally), rather than a failure. For purposes of compatibility - a person might have a brand-new wget on system A, but for whatever reason, have to run an older wget on system B. But it's convenient to have the same wget regardless.
This came up for us in TeX Live, where we use an "internal" wget to download stuff -- a user had a new .wgetrc directive, which caused the (slightly older) wget we had to fail. It was not a simple thing to debug, or detect. best, karl
