This is very sad, because I'm really hoping Metalink will become a wider standard. (Look it up on Wikipedia if you're not familiar with it.)
cURL and Wget will support it /eventually/, but something else is needed in the meantime. None of the major Metalink clients are easy for a relative noob like me to install manually: * aria2 version 1.10.3 ("stable") won't compile under OpenBSD 4.7 stable (see http://pastebin.com/Bw7RFSgA). I found a post on this mailing list from 2006, subject "NEW: net/aria2 (0.9.0)", but that port is no longer there, and the old binary doesn't work. * wxDownload Fast (aka wxdfast) version 0.6.0 wouldn't compile either (see http://pastebin.com/s0ErUpaW). I have wxWidgets-gtk2-2.8.10p0 installed via pkg_add. * mulk 0.5.1 `./configure` dies with "cannot compile without libcurl", even though I have curl installed from ports (and there is no libcurl port). Don't have the time to figure this out right now. * CPAN doesn't have anything related to metalink. Pylibmetalink 0.1.1 didn't install via easy_install-2.5 or manually, even after I tweaked setup.py to remove '-Wextra' (see http://pastebin.com/6CfiXAVb). The Python library at http://sourceforge.net/projects/metalinks seems OK. * I didn't yet try any of the Qt (KGet), XUL (FlashGot, DownThemAll), emulated (Wine), or Java-based (Phex, Retriever, JDownloader), clients because I need something light. I also didn't yet try "(pre)alpha" clients like Gget, Celerius, and Snappy. There's a complete list at: http://metalinker.org/implementation.html Am I doing something wrong? Is anyone working on porting any of those? Best regards, Alex Libman -- http://www.fastmail.fm - A no graphics, no pop-ups email service