On Tue, 15 Apr 2008, Anthony Bryan wrote:

> Tatsuhiro Tsujikawa is writing a small metalink parser in C, to be used by
> wget.
>
> Could this be used for curl as well?

Absolutely, there's no practical reason why we couldn't! It would of course
require that the source code is donated to us using a suitable license (which
wouldn't be the same license wget wants it as).

Of course it begs the question if that ends up as a complete speparate library
both curl and wget can use?

> Micah Cowan, wget's maintainer said "Of course, curl and Wget would also
> require interfacing code to _use_ the parser, as well as to fall back to the
> alternatives when one of them fails."

Indeed.

The parsing of metalink is actually the lesser part of the work I'd say
(although of course not insignificant), as there's no real internal support in
curl for multiple simultaneous streams although libcurl offers quite extensive
support for doing it.

In wget that lacking infrastructure is probably an even bigger hurdle since
they don't even have an underlying lib that supports this.

Changing curl's internals to support parallell transfers is something I've
been wanting to do for ages though, so it would be a nice additional bonus
if/when metalink support is added. Of course, I've also been a bit "scared" to
introduce parallell transfers in general since it opens up a whole new can of
worms on how things should work and how to display the transfers and how to
display failures and...

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