Hey Emacs, this is -*- outline -*- mode
-This is the to-do list for Wget. There is no timetable of when we plan to
-implement these features -- this is just a list of things it'd be nice to see in
-Wget. Patches to implement any of these items would be gladly accepted. The
-items are not listed in any particular order (except that recently-added items
-may tend towards the top). Not all of these represent user-visible
-changes.
-
-* It would be nice to have a simple man page for wget that refers you to the
- .info files for more information. It could be as simple as the output of wget
- --help plus some boilerplate. This should stop wget re-packagers like RedHat
- who include the out-of-date 1.4.5 man page in order to have one. Perhaps we
- can automatically generate a man page from the .texi file like gcc does?
+This is the to-do list for GNU Wget. There is no timetable of when we
+plan to implement these features -- this is just a list of features
+we'd like to see in Wget, as well as a list of problems that need
+fixing. Patches to implement these items are likely to be accepted,
+especially if they follow the coding convention outlined in PATCHES
+and if they patch the documentation as well.
+
+The items are not listed in any particular order (except that
+recently-added items may tend towards the top). Not all of these
+represent user-visible changes.
+
+* Currently Wget mirrors remote FTP permissions whenever it retrieves
+ the directory listing. This is undesirable for most users, as
+ permissions like "664" are frequently used on the servers, which
+ might not be what the user wants. Wget should be changed not to
+ mirror remote FTP permissions by default. There should be a new
+ option add an option that enables this back on.
+
+* Honor `Content-Disposition: XXX; filename="FILE"' when creating the
+ file name. If possible, try not to break `-nc' and friends when
+ doing that.
+
+* Should allow retries with multiple downloads when using -O on
+ regular files. As the source comment says: "A possible solution to
+ [rewind not working with multiple downloads] would be to remember
+ the file position in the output document and to seek to that
+ position, instead of rewinding."
+
+ But the above won't work for -O/dev/stdout, when stdout is a pipe.
+ An even better solution would be to simply keep writing to the same
+ file descriptor each time, instead of reopening it in append mode.
+
+* Wget shouldn't delete rejected files that were not downloaded, but
+ just found on disk because of `-nc'. For example, `wget -r -nc
+ -A.gif URL' should allow the user to get all the GIFs without
+ removing any of the existing HTML files.
+
+* Be careful not to lose username/password information given for the
+ URL on the command line.
+
+* Add a --range parameter allowing you to explicitly specify a range
+ of bytes to get from a file over HTTP (FTP only supports ranges
+ ending at the end of the file, though forcibly disconnecting from
+ the server at the desired endpoint might be workable).
+
+* If multiple FTP URLs are specified that are on the same host, Wget should
+ re-use the connection rather than opening a new one for each file.
* Try to devise a scheme so that, when password is unknown, Wget asks
the user for one.
-* Limit the number of successive redirection to max. 20 or so.
+* If -c used with -N, check to make sure a file hasn't changed on the server
+ before "continuing" to download it (preventing a bogus hybrid file).
-* If -c used on a file that's already completely downloaded, don't re-download
- it (unless normal --timestamping processing would cause you to do so).
-
-* Take a look at
- <http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/robots/norobots-rfc.html>
- and support the new directives.
-
-* Generalize --html-extension to something like --mime-extensions and have it
- look at mime.types/mimecap file for preferred extension. Non-HTML files with
- filenames changed this way would be re-downloaded each time despite -N unless
- .orig files were saved for them. Since .orig would contain the same data as
- non-.orig, the latter could be just a link to the former. Another possibility
+* Generalize --html-extension to something like --mime-extensions and
+ have it look at mime.types/mimecap file for preferred extension.
+ Non-HTML files with filenames changed this way would be
+ re-downloaded each time despite -N unless .orig files were saved for
+ them. Since .orig would contain the same data as non-.orig, the
+ latter could be just a link to the former. Another possibility
would be to implement a per-directory database called something like
.wget_url_mapping containing URLs and their corresponding filenames.
files in a certain directory on _one_ of the hosts (-I and -X apply to all).
Perhaps -I and -X should take an optional hostname before the directory?
-* Add an option to not encode special characters like ' ' and '~' when saving
- local files. Would be good to have a mode that encodes all special characters
- (as now), one that encodes none (as above), and one that only encodes a
- character if it was encoded in the original URL (e.g. %20 but not %7E).
-
* --retr-symlinks should cause wget to traverse links to directories too.
* Make wget return non-zero status in more situations, like incorrect HTTP auth.
-* Timestamps are sometimes not copied over on files retrieved by FTP.
-
* Make -K compare X.orig to X and move the former on top of the latter if
they're the same, rather than leaving identical .orig files laying around.
-* If CGI output is saved to a file, e.g. cow.cgi?param, -k needs to change the
- '?' to a "%3F" in links to that file to avoid passing part of the filename as
- a parameter.
-
-* Make `-k' convert <base href=...> too.
-
* Make `-k' check for files that were downloaded in the past and convert links
to them in newly-downloaded documents.
* Add option to clobber existing file names (no `.N' suffixes).
-* Introduce a concept of "boolean" options. For instance, every
- boolean option `--foo' would have a `--no-foo' equivalent for
- turning it off. Get rid of `--foo=no' stuff. Short options would
- be handled as `-x' vs. `-nx'.
-
-* Implement "thermometer" display (not all that hard; use an
- alternative show_progress() if the output goes to a terminal.)
-
* Add option to only list wildcard matches without doing the download.
-* Add case-insensitivity as an option.
-
* Handle MIME types correctly. There should be an option to (not)
retrieve files based on MIME types, e.g. `--accept-types=image/*'.
-* Implement "persistent" retrieving. In "persistent" mode Wget should
- treat most of the errors as transient.
-
* Allow time-stamping by arbitrary date.
-* Fix Unix directory parser to allow for spaces in file names.
-
* Allow size limit to files (perhaps with an option to download oversize files
up through the limit or not at all, to get more functionality than [u]limit.
-* Implement breadth-first retrieval.
-
* Download to .in* when mirroring.
* Add an option to delete or move no-longer-existent files when mirroring.
-* Implement a switch to avoid downloading multiple files (e.g. x and x.gz).
-
* Implement uploading (--upload URL?) in FTP and HTTP.
* Rewrite FTP code to allow for easy addition of new commands. It
should probably be coded as a simple DFA engine.
-* Recognize more FTP servers (VMS).
-
* Make HTTP timestamping use If-Modified-Since facility.
-* Implement better spider options.
-
* Add more protocols (e.g. gopher and news), implementing them in a
modular fashion.
-* Implement a concept of "packages" a la mirror.
-
-* Implement correct RFC1808 URL parsing.
-
-* Implement HTTP cookies.
-
-* Implement more HTTP/1.1 bells and whistles (ETag, Content-MD5 etc.)
-
-* Add a "rollback" option to have --continue throw away a configurable number of
- bytes at the end of a file before resuming download. Apparently, some stupid
- proxies insert a "transfer interrupted" string we need to get rid of.
+* Add a "rollback" option to have continued retrieval throw away a
+ configurable number of bytes at the end of a file before resuming
+ download. Apparently, some stupid proxies insert a "transfer
+ interrupted" string we need to get rid of.
projects / wget / blobdiff