Improving availability and guaranteeing integrity in ISO downloads

[Jesse Keating]

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.

-- 
Jesse Keating
Release Engineer: Fedora
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