[CentOS-devel] RE: www.centos.org - Contact Us Form - metalinks

Fri Aug 4 15:06:39 UTC 2006
Anthony L. Bryan <albryan at comcast.net>

> 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/