> support for MetaLink > > Current Wget? I think someone's actually working on this. But, given Wget's > current single-connection support, it couldn't be much more than falling back > on one URL when another is broken. > Pluggable/Library Wget (with multiple connections)? Doable. A level of > difficulty. > Pipelines Wget? Use a Metalink "getter" rather than the stock Pipes-Wget > "getter". The Metalink "getter" itself would probably manage the use of > several invocations of stock Pipes-Wget "getter".
I don't think anyone is specifically working on a patch for wget yet. But a new version of Tatsuhiro's libmetalink (C library) [1] is getting close to release & only lacks documentation. Is anyone from the wget community interested in adding Metalink support? If you are, please contact me! For those unfamiliar, Metalink is an XML format listing URLs (mirrors), checksums, and other information about downloads. It's used by projects such as OpenOffice.org, openSUSE, Ubuntu, and many others. Metalink support in the current wget (which I think would still be useful) would include: download from a single URL (no multi-source downloads). wget would get a URL from the mirror list in the .metalink (preferably one with the highest priority). verification of the whole file checksum at the end of the transfer. optionally, if that server/URL went down wget could switch to the next highest priority URL. optionally, if there was an error in transfer wget could request that chunk again and compare against the chunk checksums. Inclusion in wget is dependent on code quality, adherence to GNU standards, etc. It will be disabled by default, but enabled with the appropriate switch to ./configure. -- (( Anthony Bryan ... Metalink [ http://www.metalinker.org ] )) Easier, More Reliable, Self Healing Downloads [1] http://code.google.com/p/libmetalink/
