Re: setup RFC: Ditch homegrown http/ftp code and use a library?

[Brian Dessent <brian at dessent dot net>]

Lapo Luchini wrote:

> >It would be nice if setup.exe supported the rsync protocol.  That would
> >also give you the ability to suspend and resume.  I don't know how easy
> >it would be to get librsync working in a mingw environment, though.
>
> This may not be really "up-to-date" but rsync use is still "your life is
> so much better if you spawn an actual rsync program to do the work",
> e.g. rsync authors themself "suggest" not to use librsync.

Plus, with ftp resume and http byte-range support from libcurl (or
equiv) you can achieve almost the same thing.  If you have a local
.tar.bz2 file of the same name but smaller size from a prior aborted
download, just resume the download a few kbytes prior to the tail of the
file that you have, and if that rollback amount matches up then just
continue the download to the end.  And in any case you've always got the
md5sum so worst case you just redownload the package.

The case that rsync would be nice is where the package files are updated
on the mirror but the filename/version not bumped.  However that seems
to happen so infrequently (if ever) that it's probably not a big deal.

(And of course, you can always use rsync out-of-band.  For example, you
can keep a local package dir rsync'd from mirrors.kernel.org or another
mirror site that runs rsync and then run setup on the local dir.)

Brian