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13 who include the out-of-date 1.4.5 man page in order to have one.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.
21 * If -c used on a file that's already completely downloaded, don't re-download
22 it (unless normal --timestamping processing would cause you to do so).
25 <http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/robots/norobots-rfc.html>
26 and support the new directives.
28 * Generalize --html-extension to something like --mime-extensions and have it
29 look at mime.types/mimecap file for preferred extension. Non-HTML files with
30 filenames changed this way would be re-downloaded each time despite -N unless
31 .orig files were saved for them. Since .orig would contain the same data as
32 non-.orig, the latter could be just a link to the former. Another possibility
33 would be to implement a per-directory database called something like
34 .wget_url_mapping containing URLs and their corresponding filenames.
36 * When spanning hosts, there's no way to say that you are only interested in
37 files in a certain directory on _one_ of the hosts (-I and -X apply to all).
38 Perhaps -I and -X should take an optional hostname before the directory?
40 * Add an option to not encode special characters like ' ' and '~' when saving
41 local files. Would be good to have a mode that encodes all special characters
42 (as now), one that encodes none (as above), and one that only encodes a
43 character if it was encoded in the original URL (e.g. %20 but not %7E).
45 * --retr-symlinks should cause wget to traverse links to directories too.
47 * Make wget return non-zero status in more situations, like incorrect HTTP auth.
49 * Timestamps are sometimes not copied over on files retrieved by FTP.
51 * Make -K compare X.orig to X and move the former on top of the latter if
52 they're the same, rather than leaving identical .orig files laying around.
54 * Allow mirroring of FTP URLs where logging in puts you somewhere else besides
57 * If CGI output is saved to a file, e.g. cow.cgi?param, -k needs to change the
58 '?' to a "%3F" in links to that file to avoid passing part of the filename as
61 * Make `-k' convert <base href=...> too.
63 * Make `-k' check for files that were downloaded in the past and convert links
64 to them in newly-downloaded documents.
66 * Add option to clobber existing file names (no `.N' suffixes).
68 * Introduce a concept of "boolean" options. For instance, every
69 boolean option `--foo' would have a `--no-foo' equivalent for
70 turning it off. Get rid of `--foo=no' stuff. Short options would
71 be handled as `-x' vs. `-nx'.
73 * Implement "thermometer" display (not all that hard; use an
74 alternative show_progress() if the output goes to a terminal.)
76 * Add option to only list wildcard matches without doing the download.
78 * Add case-insensitivity as an option.
80 * Handle MIME types correctly. There should be an option to (not)
81 retrieve files based on MIME types, e.g. `--accept-types=image/*'.
83 * Implement "persistent" retrieving. In "persistent" mode Wget should
84 treat most of the errors as transient.
86 * Allow time-stamping by arbitrary date.
88 * Fix Unix directory parser to allow for spaces in file names.
90 * Allow size limit to files (perhaps with an option to download oversize files
91 up through the limit or not at all, to get more functionality than [u]limit.
93 * Implement breadth-first retrieval.
95 * Download to .in* when mirroring.
97 * Add an option to delete or move no-longer-existent files when mirroring.
99 * Implement a switch to avoid downloading multiple files (e.g. x and x.gz).
101 * Implement uploading (--upload URL?) in FTP and HTTP.
103 * Rewrite FTP code to allow for easy addition of new commands. It
104 should probably be coded as a simple DFA engine.
106 * Recognize more FTP servers (VMS).
108 * Make HTTP timestamping use If-Modified-Since facility.
110 * Implement better spider options.
112 * Add more protocols (e.g. gopher and news), implementing them in a
115 * Implement a concept of "packages" a la mirror.
117 * Implement correct RFC1808 URL parsing.
119 * Implement HTTP cookies.
121 * Implement more HTTP/1.1 bells and whistles (ETag, Content-MD5 etc.)