> Anthony, this would be a huge help for users living in third-world > countries, and for other users with unreliable connections. In > Vietnam, it will take you all day to download OpenOffice, if you're > lucky. The connections are appalling, dropping out all the time, very > low quality even when they're supposedly up. > > This would also mean we don't have to provide a list of alternative > download links, and can avoid the progressive damage of file data you > get in a low-quality network. Most of our users are new users: we > need to simplify the process as much as we can. We're about to > release our first supported version of OpenOffice (2.1), and the > problem of facilitating download of such a huge file has been > worrying us considerably. > > XML is enormously flexible. XLIFF, the localization implementation of > XML, will revolutionize free-software translation, and is already the > basis of some free-software localization tools. > > Please tell us how we can use Metalink. :) > > from Clytie (vi-VN, Vietnamese free-software translation team / nhóm > Việt hóa phần mềm tự do) > http://groups-beta.google.com/group/vi-VN
Hi Clytie, This should be a good fit. The programs that support Metalink are already download managers, which are good for these unreliable connections, since they allow downloads to be paused and resumed. With the Metalinks, you have the alternate/extra links for higher reliability, and the automatic checksum verification. (Soon clients should also support checksums for portions of a file, so if there is an error in transmit, only the error portion will need to be re-downloaded - which could be very helpful in your case. Right now, if there is one error, the whole 100 MB or so file has to be re-downloaded). To use Metalink, all you need are a list of your mirrors. There's an article at http://www.osresources.com/3_18_en.html on "Making Metalinks." You will probably want to use the Metalink tools (http://metalinks.sourceforge.net/) to make yours. Since the .metalink files are XML text, you can just view them in a text editor to check them out. The important parts are the <url>s and checksums. Then test them out with the clients (there are some on Mac, Unix, and Windows). Will the files you want to distribute be for multiple OSes? Multiple languages or just Vietnamese? If you need any help, please email me. (( Anthony Bryan )) Metalink [ http://www.metalinker.org ] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
