1 GNU Wget NEWS -- history of user-visible changes.
3 Copyright (C) 1997, 1998, 2000, 2001 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
4 See the end for copying conditions.
6 Please send GNU Wget bug reports to <bug-wget@gnu.org>.
8 * Changes in Wget 1.7-dev
10 ** Wget now has a man page again (last version with one was 1.4.5). It is
11 automatically generated if you have pod2man installed (comes with Perl 5).
13 ** Wget can now recognize FTP directory listings from some non-Unix
14 servers. Currently Windows NT is supported.
16 ** It is now possible to recurse through FTP sites where logging in
17 puts you in some directory other than '/'.
19 ** "Keep-Alive" connections are now supported.
21 ** https (SSL) URLs are now supported if you link wget with OpenSSL.
23 ** The HTML parser has been rewritten. The new one works more
24 reliably, allows finer-grained control over which tags and attributes
25 are detected, and has better support for some features like correctly
26 skipping comments and declarations, decoding entities, etc. It is
29 ** <meta name="robots"> tags are now respected.
31 ** Wget's internal tables now use hash tables instead of linked lists
32 where appropriate. This results in huge speedups when retrieving
33 large sites (thousands of documents).
35 ** Wget now mmaps the files it needs to read instead of allocating
36 heap memory to read them.
40 ** Administrative changes.
42 *** Maintainership. Due to Hrvoje being plagued with a "real job",
43 Dan Harkless is the most active maintainer (not that he doesn't have a
44 real job as well). Hrvoje still participates occasionally, and both
45 are being helped by many other people.
47 *** Web page. Thanks to Jan Prikryl, Wget has an "official" web page.
50 http://sunsite.dk/wget/
52 *** Anonymous CVS. Thanks to ever-helpful Karsten Thygesen, Wget
53 sources are now available at an anonymous CVS server. Take a look at
54 the web page for downloading instructions.
56 ** New -K / --backup-converted / backup_converted = on option causes files
57 modified due to -k to be saved with a .orig prefix before being changed. When
58 using -N as well, it is these .orig files that are compared against the server.
60 ** New --follow-tags / follow_tags = ... option allows you to restrict
61 Wget to following only certain HTML tags when doing a recursive
62 retrieval. -G / --ignore-tags / ignore_tags = ... is just the
63 opposite -- all tags but the ones you specify will be followed.
65 ** New --waitretry / waitretry = SECONDS option allows waiting between retries
66 of failed downloads. Wget will use "linear" backoff, waiting 1 second after the
67 first failure, 2 after the second, up to SECONDS. waitretry is set to 10 by
68 default in the system wgetrc.
70 ** New -p / --page-requisites / page_requisites = on option causes
71 Wget to download all ancillary files necessary to display a given HTML
72 page properly (e.g. inlined images).
74 ** New -E / --html-extension / html_extension = on option causes Wget
75 to append ".html" to text/html filenames not ending in regexp
76 "\.[Hh][Tt][Mm][Ll]?".
78 ** New type of .wgetrc command -- "lockable Boolean". Can be set to on, off,
79 always, or never. This allows the .wgetrc to override the commandline. So far,
80 passive_ftp is the only .wgetrc command which takes a lockable Boolean.
82 ** A number of new translation files have been added.
84 ** New --bind-address / bind_address = <address> option for people on hosts
85 bound to multiple IP addresses.
87 ** wget now accepts (illegal per HTTP spec) relative URLs in HTTP redirects.
89 * Wget 1.5.3 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
91 * Wget 1.5.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
93 * Wget 1.5.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
95 * Changes in Wget 1.5.0
97 ** Wget speaks many languages!
99 On systems with gettext(), Wget will output messages in the language
100 set by the current locale, if available. At this time we support
101 Czech, German, Croatian, Italian, Norwegian and Portuguese.
103 ** Opie (Skey) is now supported with FTP.
105 ** HTTP Digest Access Authentication (RFC2069) is now supported.
107 ** The new `-b' option makes Wget go to background automatically.
109 ** The `-I' and `-X' options now accept wildcard arguments.
111 ** The `-w' option now accepts suffixes `s' for seconds, `m' for
112 minutes, `h' for hours, `d' for days and `w' for weeks.
114 ** Upon getting SIGHUP, the whole previous log is now copied to
117 ** Wget now understands proxy settings with explicit usernames and
118 passwords, e.g. `http://user:password@proxy.foo.com/'.
120 ** You can use the new `--cut-dirs' option to make Wget create less
123 ** The `;type=a' appendix to FTP URLs is now recognized. For
124 instance, the following command will retrieve the welcoming message in
127 wget "ftp://ftp.somewhere.com/welcome.msg;type=a"
129 ** `--help' and `--version' options have been redone to to conform to
130 standards set by other GNU utilities.
132 ** Wget should now be compilable under MS Windows environment. MS
133 Visual C++ and Watcom C have been used successfully.
135 ** If the file length is known, percentages are displayed during
138 ** The manual page, now hopelessly out of date, is no longer
139 distributed with Wget.
141 * Wget 1.4.5 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
143 * Wget 1.4.4 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
145 * Changes in Wget 1.4.3
147 ** Wget is now a GNU utility.
149 ** Can do passive FTP.
153 ** Info documentation expanded.
155 ** Compiles on pre-ANSI compilers.
157 ** Global wgetrc now goes to /usr/local/etc (i.e. $sysconfdir).
161 * Changes in Wget 1.4.2
163 ** New mirror site at ftp://sunsite.auc.dk/pub/infosystems/wget/,
164 thanks to Karsten Thygesen.
166 ** Mailing list! Mail to wget-request@sunsite.auc.dk to subscribe.
168 ** New option --delete-after for proxy prefetching.
170 ** New option --retr-symlinks to retrieve symbolic links like plain
173 ** rmold.pl -- script to remove files deleted on the remote server
175 ** --convert-links should work now.
179 * Changes in Wget 1.4.1
183 ** Added -I (the opposite of -X).
185 ** Dot tracing is now customizable; try wget --dot-style=binary
187 * Changes in Wget 1.4.0
189 ** Wget 1.4.0 [formerly known as Geturl] is an extensive rewrite of
190 Geturl. Although many things look suspiciously similar, most of the
191 stuff was rewritten, like recursive retrieval, HTTP, FTP and mostly
192 everything else. Wget should be now easier to debug, maintain and,
193 most importantly, use.
195 ** Recursive HTTP should now work without glitches, even with Location
196 changes, server-generated directory listings and other naughty stuff.
198 ** HTTP regetting is supported on servers that support Range
199 specification. WWW authorization is supported -- try
200 wget http://user:password@hostname/
202 ** FTP support was rewritten and widely enhanced. Globbing should now
203 work flawlessly. Symbolic links are created locally. All the
204 information the Unix-style ls listing can give is now recognized.
206 ** Recursive FTP is supported, e.g.
207 wget -r ftp://gnjilux.cc.fer.hr/pub/unix/util/
209 ** You can specify "rejected" directories, to which you do not want to
210 enter, e.g. with wget -X /pub
212 ** Time-stamping is supported, with both HTTP and FTP. Try wget -N URL.
214 ** A new texinfo reference manual is provided. It can be read with
215 Emacs, standalone info, or converted to HTML, dvi or postscript.
217 ** Fixed a long-standing bug, so that Wget now works over SLIP
220 ** You can have a system-wide wgetrc (/usr/local/lib/wgetrc by
221 default). Settings in $HOME/.wgetrc override the global ones, of
224 ** You can set up quota in .wgetrc to prevent sucking too much
225 data. Try `quota = 5M' in .wgetrc (or quota = 100K if you want your
226 sysadmin to like you).
228 ** Download rate is printed after retrieval.
230 ** Wget now sends the `Referer' header when retrieving
233 ** With the new --no-parent option Wget can retrieve FTP recursively
234 through a proxy server.
236 ** HTML parser, as well as the whole of Wget was rewritten to be much
237 faster and less memory-consuming (yes, both).
239 ** Absolute links can be converted to relative links locally. Check
242 ** Wget catches hangup, filtering the output to a log file and
243 resuming work. Try kill -HUP %?wget.
245 ** User-defined headers can be sent. Try
247 wget http://fly.cc.her.hr/ --header='Accept-Charset: iso-8859-2'
249 ** Acceptance/Rejection lists may contain wildcards.
251 ** Wget can display HTTP headers and/or FTP server response with the
252 new `-S' option. It can save the original HTTP headers with `-s'.
254 ** socks library is now supported (thanks to Antonio Rosella
255 <Antonio.Rosella@agip.it>). Configure with --with-socks.
257 ** There is a nicer display of REST-ed output.
259 ** Many new options (like -x to force directory hierarchy, or -m to
260 turn on mirroring options).
262 ** Wget is now distributed under GNU General Public License (GPL).
264 ** Lots of small features I can't remember. :-)
266 ** A host of bugfixes.
268 * Changes in Geturl 1.3
270 ** Added FTP globbing support (ftp://fly.cc.fer.hr/*)
272 ** Added support for no_proxy
274 ** Added support for ftp://user:password@host/
276 ** Added support for %xx in URL syntax
278 ** More natural command-line options
280 ** Added -e switch to execute .geturlrc commands from the command-line
282 ** Added support for robots.txt
284 ** Fixed some minor bugs
286 * Geturl 1.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
288 * Changes in Geturl 1.1
290 ** REST supported in FTP
292 ** Proxy servers supported
294 ** GNU getopt used, which enables command-line arguments to be ordered
295 as you wish, e.g. geturl http://fly.cc.fer.hr/ -vo log is the same as
296 geturl -vo log http://fly.cc.fer.hr/
298 ** Netscape-compatible URL syntax for HTTP supported: host[:port]/dir/file
300 ** NcFTP-compatible colon URL syntax for FTP supported: host:/dir/file
302 ** <base href="xxx"> supported
304 ** autoconf supported
306 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
307 Copyright information:
309 Copyright (C) 1997, 1998, 2000 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
311 Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim
312 copies of this document as received, in any medium, provided that
313 the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved, thus
314 giving the recipient permission to redistribute in turn.
316 Permission is granted to distribute modified versions of this
317 document, or of portions of it, under the above conditions,
318 provided also that they carry prominent notices stating who last