Jesse Keating wrote:
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.
I recently worked on a tiny tool to use already downloaded files to
reconstruct a full iso-image {eg Fedora test to Fedora release iso}. I
could have made this a lot more sure that it was doing the right thing
by comparing sha1sum of the individual files with reference sha1sum
files. {for interest see:
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2007-June/msg00018.html }
The simplest way to do this would be for the iso spin system to perform
an sha1sum * > SHA1SUM within each directory of an iso spin, and have
each result inserted into the corresponding directory.
I could see other uses for embedding checksums within the iso archive :
- live test the files written within an iso image:
- insert media {gets automounted}
- cd /media/whatever
- sha1sum -c SHA1SUM
- actually proves the disc/drive/PC can properly read the individual
files.
This could be extended to a simple tool in the root folder that can
verify that all files in all folders on the cd/dvd are readable and
correct. {python would be my weapon of choice, but }.
- Enable fast download method like above/jigdo/bittorrent to work on per
file contained within the {iso} archive, rather than the iso file {whole
or in fixed sized pieces that span/split files}
- This makes it easier for a download tool to verify that a file
found as a potential content of an iso is actually the correct file to
insert.
Is inserting per folder checksum results into the iso image a do-able
thing ? Would a patch to achieve such be considered ?
DaveT.
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