An anonymous user appeared on IRC today to discuss segmented downloading. While he had suggested we allow the user to pick a downloading client, we pressed our goal of staying with as much system- provided utilities for core operations as possible.

To that end, I'd like to start up some discussion in our mailing list regarding a few aspects of the fetch phase.

With the advent of 1.8.0, we will have a faster dependency search. This will allow us to quickly find all the ports associated with a build and begin downloading them. While we could perform all these downloads before we commence building, why not have them be done in parallel [1]?

Similarly, taking the aspect of segmented downloading, would we be interested in having an even number of segments as there are mirrors for a port? That is, one instance of curl will download the first third of the file from the main site, a second third from the first mirror, and the final portion from the last mirror; hopefully all three finish in the same time as a third of the original download since you may be maximizing your download capacity [2].

I feel that the latter functionality should be an opt-in feature, as some users may not want to suck up their bandwidth. The former should definitely be implemented as there is no reason to wait for a build to finish before fetching more files.

Your thoughts, gentlemen?

 [1] http://trac.macports.org/ticket/2421
 [2] https://trac.macports.org/ticket/20652

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