Motivation:
FTS supports bulk operations, but using its own specific format. The metalink is a well-documented (see RFC 5854) XML format that describes how to receive a set of files.
Support for metalink would allow FTS to accept a bulk transfer request with the FTS user presenting the information in a standard fashion.
Modification:
Add initial support for parsing the metalink XML format. The idea is that the user presents a base URL that all files (within the metalink file) are resolved against.
There are several limitations with the current implementation:
-
Metalink allows for a file to have multiple sources. This patch selects only the best url (the one with the lowest priority value).
-
There are several types of source URLs supported by metalink (http, bittorrent, etc.). The code currently assumes that any source URL is acceptable by FTS
-
In principle, the metalink allows a file to have different digest values, as calculated by different checksum algorithms. Currently, only adler32 checksums are supported.
Result:
It is now possible to submit a bulk request to FTS using a metalink file.