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 * It would be nice to have a simple man page for wget that refers you to the
11 .info files for more information. It could be as simple as the output of wget
12 --help plus some boilerplate. This should stop wget re-packagers like RedHat
13 who include the out-of-date 1.4.5 man page in order to have one. Perhaps we
14 can automatically generate a man page from the .texi file like gcc does?
16 * Try to devise a scheme so that, when password is unknown, Wget asks
19 * Limit the number of successive redirection to max. 20 or so.
22 <http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/robots/norobots-rfc.html>
23 and support the new directives.
25 * Generalize --html-extension to something like --mime-extensions and have it
26 look at mime.types/mimecap file for preferred extension. Non-HTML files with
27 filenames changed this way would be re-downloaded each time despite -N unless
28 .orig files were saved for them. Since .orig would contain the same data as
29 non-.orig, the latter could be just a link to the former. Another possibility
30 would be to implement a per-directory database called something like
31 .wget_url_mapping containing URLs and their corresponding filenames.
33 * When spanning hosts, there's no way to say that you are only interested in
34 files in a certain directory on _one_ of the hosts (-I and -X apply to all).
35 Perhaps -I and -X should take an optional hostname before the directory?
37 * Add an option to not encode special characters like ' ' and '~' when saving
38 local files. Would be good to have a mode that encodes all special characters
39 (as now), one that encodes none (as above), and one that only encodes a
40 character if it was encoded in the original URL (e.g. %20 but not %7E).
42 * --retr-symlinks should cause wget to traverse links to directories too.
44 * Make wget return non-zero status in more situations, like incorrect HTTP auth.
46 * Timestamps are sometimes not copied over on files retrieved by FTP.
48 * Make -K compare X.orig to X and move the former on top of the latter if
49 they're the same, rather than leaving identical .orig files laying around.
51 * Allow mirroring of FTP URLs where logging in puts you somewhere else besides
54 * If CGI output is saved to a file, e.g. cow.cgi?param, -k needs to change the
55 '?' to a "%3F" in links to that file to avoid passing part of the filename as
58 * Make `-k' convert <base href=...> too.
60 * Make `-k' check for files that were downloaded in the past and convert links
61 to them in newly-downloaded documents.
63 * Add option to clobber existing file names (no `.N' suffixes).
65 * Introduce a concept of "boolean" options. For instance, every
66 boolean option `--foo' would have a `--no-foo' equivalent for
67 turning it off. Get rid of `--foo=no' stuff. Short options would
68 be handled as `-x' vs. `-nx'.
70 * Implement "thermometer" display (not all that hard; use an
71 alternative show_progress() if the output goes to a terminal.)
73 * Add option to only list wildcard matches without doing the download.
75 * Add case-insensitivity as an option.
77 * Handle MIME types correctly. There should be an option to (not)
78 retrieve files based on MIME types, e.g. `--accept-types=image/*'.
80 * Implement "persistent" retrieving. In "persistent" mode Wget should
81 treat most of the errors as transient.
83 * Allow time-stamping by arbitrary date.
85 * Fix Unix directory parser to allow for spaces in file names.
87 * Allow size limit to files (perhaps with an option to download oversize files
88 up through the limit or not at all, to get more functionality than [u]limit.
90 * Implement breadth-first retrieval.
92 * Download to .in* when mirroring.
94 * Add an option to delete or move no-longer-existent files when mirroring.
96 * Implement a switch to avoid downloading multiple files (e.g. x and x.gz).
98 * Implement uploading (--upload URL?) in FTP and HTTP.
100 * Rewrite FTP code to allow for easy addition of new commands. It
101 should probably be coded as a simple DFA engine.
103 * Recognize more FTP servers (VMS).
105 * Make HTTP timestamping use If-Modified-Since facility.
107 * Implement better spider options.
109 * Add more protocols (e.g. gopher and news), implementing them in a
112 * Implement a concept of "packages" a la mirror.
114 * Implement correct RFC1808 URL parsing.
116 * Implement HTTP cookies.
118 * Implement more HTTP/1.1 bells and whistles (ETag, Content-MD5 etc.)