Hi, Carlos.
aria2c finished the download with a checksum error - suposedly metalink had strong advanced error correction methods to avoid this very thing, but it doesn't work :-(
I'm very sorry you had a negative experience with metalink. (Hope you will have good ones in the future, when you are ready to try again). Downloading ISOs, spending all that time and bandwidth, and ending up w/ errors is very frustrating. I've been there, and that's one thing I've tried to fix w/ metalink. Unfortunately, metalink clients don't do magic yet and can only work with what information they have. Regarding error correction: Some metalink files contain no full file checksums, some contain full file checksums, some contain segment AND full file checksums, and some contain FTP/HTTP mirror links AND torrents. The segment checksums allow portions of the download with errors to be discarded, and faulty mirrors as well. Only the portions that had errors will need to be re-downloaded - aria2 doesn't support this yet. metalink clients that support torrents can use the error correction of the torrents on data received from FTP/HTTP mirrors. The openSUSE metalinks at http://download.packages.ro/metalink/opensuse/ only contain mirrors and full file checksums. (Note: These metalinks are not generated by me). This means metalink clients will download from the mirrors, and basically run an automated 'md5sum filename' once the full file has transferred - this is more verification than error correction, because it only tells you if the file is exactly correct or wrong. With a full file checksum, you still have to re-download the whole file all over again if it doesn't match.
I started it again to check, and it destroyed what was downloaded, starting from zero! :-//
Definitely a bug in aria2, please report it at their page: http://aria2.sourceforge.net . I haven't seen that happen before.
I'm sorry, but I have to recomend not to use metalink, nor aria2c. This is not ready for primetime, folks. I'll stay with torrent, thanks.
Details and technical answers to the opensuse list, please.
When you say that, it translates to "I have to recommend not to use FTP/HTTP mirrors" since that is what aria2 is doing. FTP/HTTP is not error proof, there will be errors in transfers. One error in a whole 3GB transmission means the full file checksum will not match. Some recommendations: Encourage aria2 to support segment checksums. Then, only the segments with errors will need to be re-downloaded, instead of the whole file, saving a lot of time. Encourage metalink makers to include segment checksums. (( 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