Improving availability and guaranteeing integrity in ISO downloads

Anthony Bryan anthonybryan at gmail.com
Fri Jun 8 18:24:47 UTC 2007


Hi,

I was hoping Fedora could investigate using Metalinks for their ISO
downloads. Metalink is an XML format for listing all the ways you can
get a file or collection of files (mirrors + their location, rsync,
p2p) along with checksums to automatically repair a file in case of
error, signatures, language, OS/arch, and other metadata. It's mainly
used for large files like ISOs, where errors can be very frustrating.

It's supported by about 20 programs on unix, mac, and win, including
aria2 (already in the Fedora repos). It's used by openSUSE,
OpenOffice.org, cURL, and many other distributions.

Here's a screenshot of a Metalink download in the DownThemAll Firefox
extension (nightly build). What you don't see are all the mirrors and
checksums.
http://code.downthemall.net/maierman/metaselect4.png

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalink

-- 
(( Anthony Bryan
  )) Metalink [ http://www.metalinker.org ]




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