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gsoc08-ideas    

 

If you're a developer, adding Metalink support to Open Source programs and getting projects to use it for their downloads will be a huge help. Examining the source code from current open source Metalink clients and generators could be useful.

 

Current open source Metalink clients (downloaders) 

 

Current open source Metalink generators:

Metalink is useful to Free and Open Source software. It was designed for community projects that use multiple mirrors and P2P. There is a whole ecosystem of applications, sites, and projects involved in Metalink.

 

We invite other Download Managers, Web browsers, BitTorrent clients, and other P2P programs to support Metalink.

 

Ideas:

 

We didn't get accepted for GSoC 08, but these ideas could be good starting points for newcomers. Please familiarize yourself with our project and software, and come up with ideas of your own. Please join our discussion list and post about your ideas!


Native curl support.

In progress: Tatsuhiro has failover working. Patch and discussion.

Bounty: $500 ($200 from cURL Project, $300 from Metalink)

ImportanceHIGHEST!

Difficulty: Hard?

Skills: C coding. 

Details: Daniel Stenberg, curl author, writes:

"A metalink file transfer library could be made as a layer on top of libcurl, and I think that is the only logical and sensible way.

Adding metalink support to the curl tool however, seems like a good idea to me…"

Requirements: (1) Single source (ie not multi-source) downloads from a single URL at a time. (2) Failover to other URLs listed in a Metalink if the current URL is unavailable. 

(3) Use chunk checksums and full file checksums so downloads retain integrity. (4) Code to curl's coding standards for quality and formatting so it can be incorporated into the curl sources.


Native Firefox support. 

Bounty: $500

Importance: High.

Difficulty: Hard. 

Skills: C++ coding.

Mentor: Ed Lee (Mozilla)

Bonus: Familiarity with Mozilla codebase.

Details: (This project was for Mozilla GSoC 2008, was accepted, but the student chose another organization). Firefox already handles XML & checksums so no added dependencies. The goal would be: Single source (ie no multi-source) downloads, checksum verification, and adding multiple files to the download queue.


Google Chrome support.

Bounty: $300

Importance: High.

Difficulty: Easy to Medium?

Skills: C++ coding.

Bonus: Familiarity with libxml2, which Chrome already depends on.

Details: Feature request. Chromium code.


Native wget support.

Bounty: $100

Importance: High. 

Difficulty: Hard.

Skills: C coding. 

Details: Metalink support is planned in a future version of wget, but it could be added earlier for single source (ie not multi-source) downloads, with hopefully the ability to failover to other URLs if a mirror goes down. Co-ordinate with Micah Cowan (wget maintainer) on a patch.

wget GSoC list.


Chunk checksum verification in DownThemAll! (Firefox Addon).

Importance: High.

Difficulty: Medium?

Skills: Javascript coding.

Bounty: $50

Details: DTA does full file verification right now. We just need it to use the chunk checksums to repair any errors.


FlashGot support (Firefox Addon).

Importance: High.

Difficulty: Medium?

Skills: Javascript coding.

Details: FlashGot is a Firefox Addon that interfaces with external download managers.


Packaging for Linux Distributions!

Importance: High. If apps supporting Metalink exist, but people can't use them...

Details: Most apps could use packaging so people can easily use them. aria2 & KGet are heavily packaged. GGet, Metalink tools, Metalink Editor, Metalink Checker, metalink-library, libmetalink are not packaged at all.

 

Debian has accepted a GSOC project which is similar, a Javascript Jigdo client. Presumably, it could be adapted to use .metalinks.

Details: Jigdo uses wget currently for downloads. If aria2 was used instead, it could download multiple files from multiple mirrors at one time, making the download faster and spreading load between mirrors. "Jigsaw Download, or short jigdo, is a tool designed to ease the distribution of very large files over the internet, for example CD or DVD images. Its aim is to make downloading the images as easy for users as a click on a direct download link in a browser, while avoiding all the problems that server administrators have with hosting such large files." Info on using aria2 with jigdo.


Anything that makes it easier for distributions/projects to automate Metalink creation, like Apache or Drupal modules or plugins.

Difficulty: Easy to Medium.

Skills: Depends on project.

Details: Drupal proposal: posts, blogs, new thread. Peter Poeml has added metalink creation to the openSUSE download redirector! Matt Domsch added it to Fedora's MirrorManager.

 

Custom solutions for specific projects like Debian, CentOS, Eclipse, VLC, etc.

Difficulty: Easy to Medium.

Skills: Depends on project.

Details: We'd expect you to do this for multiple projects (5-8), as each will be a small amount of work

 

Native axel (download accelerator) support. 

Difficulty: Easy to Medium. 

Skills: C coding. 

Bounty: $50

Progress: Tatsuhiro has released libmetalink, a C Metalink Parser. But this will also require some axel specific code. Philipp Hagemeister, who works on Axel plans to do this.

Details: Metalink support might require adding XML & checksum library dependency.


High Definition video downloads made faster/error free with Metalinks

Difficulty: Medium to Hard.

Skills: JSpeedStreamer written in Java, Metalink Checker in Python.

Mentor: Neil McNab (Appupdater / Metalink Checker author)

Bounty: $150

Details: Could integrate with JSpeedStreamer or use Metalink Checker.

  "JSpeedStreamer: Multi threaded HTTP proxy to speed up streaming media downloads over HTTP, no more 'Buffering.'

JSpeedStreamer is a proxy to speed up streaming media over HTTP by using multiple parallel threads for a single download. It differs from a download manager in that it delivers the data in order so that the resulting stream can be played through MPlayer, VLC or any other media player that can stream over HTTP.

  JSpeedStreamer receives a HTTP request and then divides up that request into segments, each segment is assigned to a downloading thread and is downloaded using the HTTP Range header. The threads download their data into a circular buffer and the data is delivered to the proxy client - without it knowing that there are multiple threads downloading its request."

  Metalink Checker: "It wouldn't be too difficult to pipe the output from metalink checker to VLC and see what happens.  Of course it will only work if you download the pieces in order (metalink checker generally does) so Bittorrent sources might be out."  This also might require using smaller chunk sizes than the default.

 

Browser Based Metalink Download Client

Difficulty: Medium

Skills: Java (maybe Jython) coding, could also use Silverlight/IronPython 

Bounty: $150

Progress?: Debian had a GSOC project which is similar, a Javascript Jigdo client. Presumably, it could be adapted to use .metalinks, but it was never completed.

Details: The idea is to create a "clientless" way to download Metalink files.  This way anyone with a browser with Java enabled can use and experience Metalinks without having to install a client that supports it.  It does not need to be a full featured client, probably only needs to be able to handle one metalink at a time, and has a minimal UI.  Can probably leverage reuse of existing Java or Python metalink code (Metalink Checker).

KGet: work on Metalink improvements and integrations with rest of KDE (Nepomuk, Kgpg)

Difficulty: Medium

Skills: C++ coding

Details:Add support for download repair, integration of BitTorrent/FTP/HTTP multisource downloads, pass digital signatures in Metalinks to KGpg, let Nepomuk acquire metadata for semantic desktop. KGet GSoC ideas list.

 

Integration with Bouncer which serves up files for OpenOffice.org, Mozilla, & Gentoo

Difficulty: Medium to Hard.

Skills: PHP 

Progress?: Bram submitted a patch which has not been merged yet. 

Details:  "Bouncer is a database driven mirror management app that has three main components - a bounce script, a sentry script to check mirrors and files for integrity and a set of web-based administration tools."

  Bouncer already has a database filled with information: hash, urls, preferences, etc. However, the bouncer project is trying to keep it's mirrors in shape by using a spider and checking the downloads against the real files.

By serving up metalinks, you can keep the work of the spider down and give the users more security.

 

Integration with Arch Linux's Pacman updater

Difficulty: Medium to Hard.

Skills: C coding.

Mentor: Tatsuhiro Tsujikawa (aria2 author)

Details: Arch founder Judd Vinet provided an early Metalink script on their forums. A good start for using aria2 can be at Faster Pacman Downloads and Improve Pacman Performance. Mandriva already does something similar.


BitTorrent support for Metalink Checker

Difficulty: Medium to Hard.

Skills: Python coding.

Mentor: Neil McNab (Appupdater / Metalink Checker author)

Bounty: $100 

Details: Metalink Checker currently supports only HTTP and FTP downloads.  We should be able to reuse code from other Python based Bittorrent clients and add support to Metalink Checker.  BitTornado looks like the best Python option out there.

 

Integration with FreeBSD ports infrastructure

Difficulty: Hard.

Contact: Unknown. Contact appropriate maintainers/mailing list to see if this is a possibility.

Details: "Metalink is a great concept which might be added to the ports infrastructure. Metalink files can be preprocessed in order to retain big mirror lists in bsd.sites.mk. Or an XML guru can convert bsd.sites.mk to an XML version and include it into metalinks in some way. Stub metalinks can be easily created for each port with a simple script.

At this time only www/aria2 has some Metalink support. Aria2 has a few dependencies, but it's completely unnecessary to cram it into the base system. FETCH_DEPENDS would work very nice.

Metalink support can be implemented simultaneously with P2P support, which is long overdue."


Metalink integration with Proxy/Cache

Progress: Kulbir Saini is working on this for squid with IntelligentMirror.

Bounty: $50

Importance: High.

Difficulty: ?

Details: A proxy could already have files in its cache that are listed in a metalink but they wouldn't be recognized if a different URL is used.

 

A Metalink download system similar to the BitTorrent client / server architecture

Difficulty: Ambitious and extremely hard. :)

Skills: Up to you.

Details: See Ad-Hoc Metalink Swarms?, Mirror URIs & MetaMirror Servers

 

 

 

COMPLETED!

 

Complete: Check out Appupdater 1.0!  

Design and create a friendly, easier to use GUI for Appupdater, which provides advanced functionality to Windows, similar to apt-get or yum on Linux.

Difficulty: Easy

Skills: Python coding, familiarity with UI/design issues.

Mentor: Neil McNab (Appupdater / Metalink Checker author)

Details: Get ideas from the better GUI package managers/updaters on Linux.

 

Complete: Neil has added .jigdo -> .metalink converter/downloader to Metalink Checker. 

Jigdo with .metalinks and Metalink downloader.

Difficulty: Easy.

Skills: Bash scripting for Jigdo, C++ for aria2 or other (if needed).

Mentor: Tatsuhiro Tsujikawa (aria2 author)


Complete: GGet uses Metalink Checker for metalink downloads!

GNOME/GTK GUI for Metalink Checker / Download Manager integrated into the GNOME Desktop

Difficulty: Medium ( Accepted for GNOME GSOC! )

Skills: Python coding, familiarity w/ UI/design issues

Mentor: Neil McNab (Appupdater / Metalink Checker author)

Details: Implement the features of a modern GUI download manager. Metalink Checker is written in Python and can be used as a library.

 

Complete!: MirrorManager now supports Metalink, added by Matt Domsch.

Integrate Metalink generation into Fedora's MirrorManager

Difficulty: Medium

Skills: Python coding

Details: Coordinate with Matt Domsch, MirrorManager's maintainer. Discussion on fedora-devel & fedora-infrastructure.

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