Thanks for getting in touch about metalinks. I've personally never heard about this before, but it sounds interesting. The first question that comes to mind is - how many user end download clients support this format ?
And, if we are to publish these, we'd need some means to generate them automatically, perhaps a hook into the mirror-monitor scripts. But thats a future issue.
I am cross posting this to the CentOS-Devel list, so that more people might be able to get involved in the conversation. I suggest you subscribe to that list ( http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos-devel )
Hi Karanbir, thanks for writing back.
You haven't heard about metalinks before because its all word of mouth so far :) OpenOffice.org is the only 'large' site using it at the moment. It was really designed with ISOs in mind tho, so I'd be excited if you used it.
Currently, 3 clients support metalink, one for Mac (Speed Download), Unix (aria2 - http://aria2.sourceforge.net), and Windows (GetRight). 5 more clients are in the process of adding support.
As far as automation, http://metalink.packages.ro/ has perl source for generating metalinks. If you need hooks into your mirror-monitor scripts, I would be interested in supporting development of those so they could be used elsewhere too.
I've made a metalink for CentOS-4.3-i386-LiveCD.iso (http://www.metalinker.org/samples.html#isos).
I've spent a few minutes on this, if you could, I'd ask you to try it out once (at a place with a good net connection). If you aren't interested, fair enough. Get aria, then:
aria2c http://www.metalinker.org/samples/CentOS-4.3-i386-LiveCD.iso.metalink
It should download (speedily) from a bunch of mirrors, then automatically verify the checksum when finished. The next version of aria2 will have even more features.
Anthony Bryan http://www.metalinker.org/