1 Hey Emacs, this is -*- outline -*- mode
3 This is the to-do list for Wget. There is no timetable of when we plan to
4 implement these features -- this is just a list of things it'd be nice to see in
5 Wget. Patches to implement any of these items would be gladly accepted. The
6 items are not listed in any particular order (except that recently-added items
7 may tend towards the top). Not all of these represent user-visible
10 * Add a --range parameter allowing you to explicitly specify a range of bytes to
11 get from a file over HTTP (FTP only supports ranges ending at the end of the
12 file, though forcibly disconnecting from the server at the desired endpoint
15 * RFC 1738 says that if logging on to an FTP server puts you in a directory
16 other than '/', the way to specify a file relative to '/' in a URL (let's use
17 "/bin/ls" in this example) is "ftp://host/%2Fbin/ls". Wget needs to support
18 this (and ideally not consider "ftp://host//bin/ls" to be equivalent, as that
19 would equate to the command "CWD " rather than "CWD /"). To accomodate people
20 used to broken FTP clients like Internet Explorer and Netscape, if
21 "ftp://host/bin/ls" doesn't exist, Wget should try again (perhaps under
22 control of an option), acting as if the user had typed "ftp://host/%2Fbin/ls".
24 * If multiple FTP URLs are specified that are on the same host, Wget should
25 re-use the connection rather than opening a new one for each file.
27 * Try to devise a scheme so that, when password is unknown, Wget asks
30 * Limit the number of successive redirection to max. 20 or so.
32 * If -c used on a file that's already completely downloaded, don't re-download
33 it (unless normal --timestamping processing would cause you to do so).
35 * If -c used with -N, check to make sure a file hasn't changed on the server
36 before "continuing" to download it (preventing a bogus hybrid file).
39 <http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/robots/norobots-rfc.html>
40 and support the new directives.
42 * Generalize --html-extension to something like --mime-extensions and have it
43 look at mime.types/mimecap file for preferred extension. Non-HTML files with
44 filenames changed this way would be re-downloaded each time despite -N unless
45 .orig files were saved for them. Since .orig would contain the same data as
46 non-.orig, the latter could be just a link to the former. Another possibility
47 would be to implement a per-directory database called something like
48 .wget_url_mapping containing URLs and their corresponding filenames.
50 * When spanning hosts, there's no way to say that you are only interested in
51 files in a certain directory on _one_ of the hosts (-I and -X apply to all).
52 Perhaps -I and -X should take an optional hostname before the directory?
54 * Add an option to not encode special characters like ' ' and '~' when saving
55 local files. Would be good to have a mode that encodes all special characters
56 (as now), one that encodes none (as above), and one that only encodes a
57 character if it was encoded in the original URL (e.g. %20 but not %7E).
59 * --retr-symlinks should cause wget to traverse links to directories too.
61 * Make wget return non-zero status in more situations, like incorrect HTTP auth.
63 * Make -K compare X.orig to X and move the former on top of the latter if
64 they're the same, rather than leaving identical .orig files laying around.
66 * If CGI output is saved to a file, e.g. cow.cgi?param, -k needs to change the
67 '?' to a "%3F" in links to that file to avoid passing part of the filename as
70 * Make `-k' convert <base href=...> too.
72 * Make `-k' check for files that were downloaded in the past and convert links
73 to them in newly-downloaded documents.
75 * Add option to clobber existing file names (no `.N' suffixes).
77 * Introduce a concept of "boolean" options. For instance, every
78 boolean option `--foo' would have a `--no-foo' equivalent for
79 turning it off. Get rid of `--foo=no' stuff. Short options would
80 be handled as `-x' vs. `-nx'.
82 * Implement "thermometer" display (not all that hard; use an
83 alternative show_progress() if the output goes to a terminal.)
85 * Add option to only list wildcard matches without doing the download.
87 * Add case-insensitivity as an option.
89 * Handle MIME types correctly. There should be an option to (not)
90 retrieve files based on MIME types, e.g. `--accept-types=image/*'.
92 * Implement "persistent" retrieving. In "persistent" mode Wget should
93 treat most of the errors as transient.
95 * Allow time-stamping by arbitrary date.
97 * Fix Unix directory parser to allow for spaces in file names.
99 * Allow size limit to files (perhaps with an option to download oversize files
100 up through the limit or not at all, to get more functionality than [u]limit.
102 * Implement breadth-first retrieval.
104 * Download to .in* when mirroring.
106 * Add an option to delete or move no-longer-existent files when mirroring.
108 * Implement a switch to avoid downloading multiple files (e.g. x and x.gz).
110 * Implement uploading (--upload URL?) in FTP and HTTP.
112 * Rewrite FTP code to allow for easy addition of new commands. It
113 should probably be coded as a simple DFA engine.
115 * Recognize more FTP servers (VMS).
117 * Make HTTP timestamping use If-Modified-Since facility.
119 * Implement better spider options.
121 * Add more protocols (e.g. gopher and news), implementing them in a
124 * Implement a concept of "packages" a la mirror.
126 * Implement correct RFC1808 URL parsing.
128 * Implement HTTP cookies.
130 * Implement more HTTP/1.1 bells and whistles (ETag, Content-MD5 etc.)
132 * Add a "rollback" option to have --continue throw away a configurable number of
133 bytes at the end of a file before resuming download. Apparently, some stupid
134 proxies insert a "transfer interrupted" string we need to get rid of.
136 * When using --accept and --reject, you can end up with empty directories. Have
137 Wget any such at the end.