Improving availability and guaranteeing integrity in ISO downloads

[Rahul Sundaram]

Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Friday 08 June 2007 14:24:47 Anthony Bryan wrote:
>> 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
> 
> This is something interesting, and I wonder if we could make use of 
> MirrorManager ( https://hosted.fedoraproject.org/projects/mirrormanager ) to 
> have dynamic .metalink files created with updated mirror readiness info.  
> Certainly something that looks worth looking into.

Suggested by me long back in Fedora infrastructure list. Someone 
expressed interest but nothing happened.

Rahul