On Sat, Dec 13, 2008 at 12:31:29AM +0900, Tatsuhiro Tsujikawa wrote:
> I made a patch to add very basic Metalink support to curl command-line
> tool. The patch is made against curl-7.19.2. Although the patch is still
> rather experimental, it provides basic fail over functionality.

This is a neat patch, but IMHO it doesn't belong in the curl command line
client. It adds functionality that goes well beyond what curl is designed
for and the UNIX philosophy behind it: to do one thing and do it well,
which is to transfer individual URLs from/to individual sites
and to allow all manner of tweaking that behaviour. That's why it
doesn't do HTML parsing, remote URL globbing, recursive transfers,
PAC proxy configuration, etc.

Metalink support is designed for something other than what curl's primary
mission is about. An indication of this is that of curl's 128 options, half
become irrelevant (and even more are marginally relevant) when doing
Metalink transfers. Adding two additional library dependencies to curl
is also an issue.

A curl-based Metalink downloader is a great idea, but as a separate program.
Of course, JMOOC, YMMV.

>>> Dan

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