The Metalink guys host a list of project ideas and one of those ideas is to add metalink support to curl, and I recently bumped the stakes a bit by raising the bounty with an additional 200 USD so that the offer is now 500 USD for the person or team that brings the feature as described.
My primary motivation for doing this is that I like the metalink idea and I’d like to help making sure it gets used more widely.
I don’t really see the value. Okay, you can have a faster download – but will user’s really notice? Is this a pain point on the internet? It looks like a lot more work for web masters.
What do you see as its value Daniel?
To me the faster download by doing multiple simultaneous transfers is not the primary fine thing. I like how this solves several problems in an attempted standardized way, problems that are already solved by people of course but in very many different ways.
These problems are for example:
asking users to download packages from a mirror and those mirrors may be up, down or out of sync. That’s typically a hassle to users. Just compare your typical GNU, linux kernel or cygwin mirrors and similar.
Helping users to use the “closest” or “best” mirror. Not all mirrors are equal.
Provide some kind of hash for the completed package to let the user verify that the final package actually in the end is the exact package that was intended.
Ah, okay. That last bit I would find especially helpful.
Perhaps someone might write a little message embedded in curl that might say, “checksums match.” I bet a lot of people do not check and I bet it leads to a lot of questions along the lines of “why didn’t my install work, I downloaded all the files . . .”