1 Hey Emacs, this is -*- outline -*- mode
3 This is the to-do list for Wget. There is no timetable of when we
4 plan to implement these features -- this is just a list of features
5 we'd like to see in Wget, as well as a list of problems that need
6 fixing. Patches to implement these items are likely to be accepted.
7 The items are not listed in any particular order (except that
8 recently-added items may tend towards the top). Not all of these
9 represent user-visible changes.
11 * Currently Wget mirrors remote FTP permissions whenever it retrieves
12 the directory listing. This is undesirable for most users, as
13 permissions like "664" are frequently used on the servers, which
14 might not be what the user wants. Wget should be changed not to
15 mirror remote FTP permissions by default. There should be a new
16 option add an option that enables this back on.
18 * Honor `Content-Disposition: XXX; filename="FILE"' when creating the
19 file name. If possible, try not to break `-nc' and friends when
22 * Should allow retries with multiple downloads when using -O on
23 regular files. As the source comment says: "A possible solution to
24 [rewind not working with multiple downloads] would be to remember
25 the file position in the output document and to seek to that
26 position, instead of rewinding."
28 But the above won't work for -O/dev/stdout, when stdout is a pipe.
29 An even better solution would be to simply keep writing to the same
30 file descriptor each time, instead of reopening it in append mode.
32 * Wget shouldn't delete rejected files that were not downloaded, but
33 just found on disk because of `-nc'. For example, `wget -r -nc
34 -A.gif URL' should allow the user to get all the GIFs without
35 removing any of the existing HTML files.
37 * Be careful not to lose username/password information given for the
38 URL on the command line.
40 * Add a --range parameter allowing you to explicitly specify a range
41 of bytes to get from a file over HTTP (FTP only supports ranges
42 ending at the end of the file, though forcibly disconnecting from
43 the server at the desired endpoint might be workable).
45 * If multiple FTP URLs are specified that are on the same host, Wget should
46 re-use the connection rather than opening a new one for each file.
48 * Try to devise a scheme so that, when password is unknown, Wget asks
51 * If -c used with -N, check to make sure a file hasn't changed on the server
52 before "continuing" to download it (preventing a bogus hybrid file).
54 * Generalize --html-extension to something like --mime-extensions and
55 have it look at mime.types/mimecap file for preferred extension.
56 Non-HTML files with filenames changed this way would be
57 re-downloaded each time despite -N unless .orig files were saved for
58 them. Since .orig would contain the same data as non-.orig, the
59 latter could be just a link to the former. Another possibility
60 would be to implement a per-directory database called something like
61 .wget_url_mapping containing URLs and their corresponding filenames.
63 * When spanning hosts, there's no way to say that you are only interested in
64 files in a certain directory on _one_ of the hosts (-I and -X apply to all).
65 Perhaps -I and -X should take an optional hostname before the directory?
67 * Add an option to not encode special characters like ' ' and '~' when saving
68 local files. Would be good to have a mode that encodes all special characters
69 (as now), one that encodes none (as above), and one that only encodes a
70 character if it was encoded in the original URL (e.g. %20 but not %7E).
72 * --retr-symlinks should cause wget to traverse links to directories too.
74 * Make wget return non-zero status in more situations, like incorrect HTTP auth.
76 * Make -K compare X.orig to X and move the former on top of the latter if
77 they're the same, rather than leaving identical .orig files laying around.
79 * Make `-k' check for files that were downloaded in the past and convert links
80 to them in newly-downloaded documents.
82 * Add option to clobber existing file names (no `.N' suffixes).
84 * Introduce real "boolean" options. Every `--foo' setting should have
85 a corresponding `--no-foo' that turns off. This is useful even for
86 options turned off by default, because the default can be reversed
87 in `.wgetrc'. Get rid of `--foo=no'. Short options would be
88 handled as `-x' vs. `-nx'.
90 * Add option to only list wildcard matches without doing the download.
92 * Handle MIME types correctly. There should be an option to (not)
93 retrieve files based on MIME types, e.g. `--accept-types=image/*'.
95 * Allow time-stamping by arbitrary date.
97 * Allow size limit to files (perhaps with an option to download oversize files
98 up through the limit or not at all, to get more functionality than [u]limit.
100 * Download to .in* when mirroring.
102 * Add an option to delete or move no-longer-existent files when mirroring.
104 * Implement uploading (--upload URL?) in FTP and HTTP.
106 * Rewrite FTP code to allow for easy addition of new commands. It
107 should probably be coded as a simple DFA engine.
109 * Make HTTP timestamping use If-Modified-Since facility.
111 * Implement better spider options.
113 * Add more protocols (e.g. gopher and news), implementing them in a
116 * Implement a concept of "packages" a la mirror.
118 * Add a "rollback" option to have continued retrieval throw away a
119 configurable number of bytes at the end of a file before resuming
120 download. Apparently, some stupid proxies insert a "transfer
121 interrupted" string we need to get rid of.
123 * When using --accept and --reject, you can end up with empty directories. Have
124 Wget any such at the end.