Hi Rajko,
The idea to automate mirror (download source) selection is great, but there is so many details on and around your web page that doesn't help me.
Let me explain.
- Project web page http://www.metalinker.org gives promisses in the same marketing style as menu commercial sites. All is so great, no problems, only benefits, the life is good.
The point of the site/text is to talk people into trying it out and giving it a chance. I've done my best to give info to most of the people interested. I'm not familiar with menu commercial sites.
- All rights reserved at the bottom, sounds so proprietary. No word about license.
That's for the text of the site. What do you mean by license? I offer no software. Some of the software that uses Metalink is under the GPL, some is commercial.
- Downloads are verified for enhanced reliability. -Nothing new for YaST users.
Cool. Not everyone uses or can use YaST in all situations :)
- No Single Point of Failure (SPOF) like FTP or HTTP URLs. -It showed that implementation is not that perfect and single point of failure ruined some people experience. Anything that comes with a lot of declarative sentences and some inserted jokes, can't give me confidence. Jokes alone are not the problem.
That is a reference to having unorganized single links to an ISO for instance. If the server goes down or is hammered, it will be hard to download. A lot of people experienced this for the 10.2 release. Metalinks list many URLs, so the clients can automate the process of connecting and using them, if some mirrors are down it recovers gracefully, and for instance not using some mirrors if the download rate is below a certain limit, etc.
- More fault tolerant. -I don't need rsync to repair anything with classic methods like wget.
? Of course you have to (or do something else), or you have to start over from scratch if there's an error in transfer. As far as I know, there is no difference in the basic transfer methods of Metalink clients and wget. Someone could quickly write a Metalink interface for wget.
- It's a neutral standard that doesn't favor any one program, Operating system, or group, and is easy to implement. -Who made it standard? I can't find references on web site.
The clients that use it. No standards body has endorsed it. If you know of any that you think would be interested, let me know.
- OpenOffice.org uses Metalinks. http://distribution.openoffice.org/p2p/magnet.html I'm removing listed magnet clients from any computer and explain users that they should not install them again. Do you think that anything listed on the same page will gain my trust?
I'm not sure what this means. Can you explain it more? Is there something untrustworthy about magnet clients? I wasn't aware of that. Metalink just happens to be listed on the same page by OpenOffice.org. If there is something wrong with them, I will try to get removed from that page.
As I said, the idea is very attractive, but marketing isn't. The download speed and convenient automation of process are not the only factors when someone uses Internet as a software source.
I'm sorry you see it as marketing, I know I'd be a pretty bad salesman. (it's just what I wrote to get the basic idea across, I don't think it's particularly good but it seemed ok to me). I think Metalink solves some problems and of course that's fine if you disagree :) I only hope that people try it out and decide for themselves. (( Anthony Bryan )) Metalink [ http://www.metalinker.org ] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org