Re: Proposing gwget for Gnome 2.10

[Maciej Katafiasz <mnews22 wp pl>]

Dnia 01-11-2004, pon o godzinie 18:13 -0500, Jonathan Blandford napisał:
> I don't think a separate download manager is really useful for the GNOME
> desktop.  Users almost never run into URIs by themselves -- they are
> almost always encountered in some context, such as web-browsing or
> email.  Epiphany's download manager is quite good.  I don't see what a
> separate application in addition to that adds.

Download manager is useful for more complicated scenarios and "power
user" ones. That is, when you're downloading things like set of .iso
files. 
Downloads like that are large, should be resumable across sessions if
needed, possible to perform using multipart connections, support
fetching multipart from >1 URL simultanously, and have ability to add
new URLs / parts on the fly, not only at the beginning of download. Not
unreasonable is support for recursive fetching and harvesting from HTML.
Needed is also ability to conveniently schedule downloads and support
for limiting connection count and automatic start of downloads.

I'm not convinced these are features that warrant inclusion in stock
GNOME (not many users casually perform mass downloads, unless you count
pr0n in, then I suspect numbers go up quite a bit ;), but having good,
HIGgish and usable download manager would be very valuable. So far,
there was none, now gwget fills in HIGgish niche, but it still lacks in
terms of features, particularly multipart is non-existant. This means on
Unixish platforms there is still no match for generally available Win32
applications, of which you have at least 3-4 viable options. For me,
it's serious lack, and I'd really love to see gwget filling the void.
Still, I don't think it'd be all that great idea to include it in GNOME,
as it's rather specialised app and goes against principle of including
software useful for general public. For that, we should indeed improve
interaction of builtin GNOME mechanisms.

Cheers,
Maciej

-- 
"Tautologizm to coś tautologicznego"
   Maciej Katafiasz <mnews2 wp pl>
         http://mathrick.org