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client: add support for metalink source

Paul Millar requested to merge pmillar/fts-rest-flask:development/add-metalink-support into develop

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.

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