[Kget] kget BIG next changes

[Anthony Bryan]

Dario:
> Ok. KGet now seems in a good shape.. But I also think it's time to pass
> to stage 2 and make it ready to really become the best downloading
> application on earth ;-)
> 
> There are a number of things the current code doesn't allow, and I
> thought about it for quite a long time.. The request to implement
> Metalink made me start thinking about the further steps we should do in
> order to improve things even more.

I apologize for indirectly causing all this work :) I do think if KGet
supports all this, it will be the best downloading app available.

If anyone is going to FOSDEM, there will be a short Metalink Lightning talk.

You might be interested in this site:

http://metalinks.infosnel.nl/ "mirrors by metadata" mirror search website
and metalink aggregator

It lists metalinks and also indexes mirrors by checksums and other stuff.
Still in testing and not the final address.

Also, I can't remember if I've posted this before or if KGet will support
checksum verification, but metalink tools
(http://prog.infosnel.nl/metalinks/) supports creating segment checksums as
well as full file checksums. It's a checksum for that chunk of the file, the
algorithm and chunk size used, and chunk number are listed in the XML like
this:

               <verification>
                       <hash
type="md5">640145695ac7506a8357a3abc2ca442e</hash>
                       <hash
type="sha1">7045ca2ff5d69a45fe9ae4eafcc2832338f05e2f</hash>
                       <pieces length="1048576" type="sha1">
                               <hash
piece="0">e8230ecbc94375b8a4b8e3b8da7d376c09d14d8e</hash>
                               <hash
piece="1">37517b42ed7353eb4b0c59f901d33197778343d9</hash>
                               <hash
piece="2">0e3edbaae7207ee8fb1439304a09c6cd95d01c57</hash>
                               <hash
piece="3">8b743c6deb7187f81daccb9f1d521b0ddcf41179</hash>
etc

As you can imagine, this is really nice for ISOs (but hopefully for other
files too). If one chunk is bad, only a small portion of the whole file
needs to be re-downloaded. Also, it can tell you if a certain mirror is
sending out bad data and not to use it. These segment checksums are used in
P2P apps, but not for ftp/http downloads. I think all of these things
together really augment the download process.

Urs:
> I like your idea! It sounds very promising. KGet is going to be a
> KILLER app
> for KDE4!

I agree. This will be the first environment with an integrated download
manager. Once people start seeing how much better and easier their transfers
can be, the other choices will be forced to catch up.

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