Re: Download manager and proxies

[Henry Baldursson <henry baldursson gmail com>]

On Tue, 30 Nov 2004 07:07:21 -0500 (EST),
epiphany-list-request gnome org <epiphany-list-request gnome org>
wrote:
> As a matter of fact, gwget *was* proposed for inclusion in GNOME 2.10,
> but rejected because (paraphrasing) "this kind of functionality belongs
> in epiphany". What I'm trying to do is to sort out which functionality
> does and which does *not* belong in Epiphany core.
> 
> Do you believe all the advanced gwget functionality should be delivered
> with GNOME mainline?

Well, my humble opinion is that it would make Gnome a more
interresting desktop- and development environment.

Let's take Ubuntu for instance, they use the Synaptic package manager.
That thing downloads .deb's and package lists from HTTP repositories.
It doesn't use the Gnome proxy settings, but rather implements its own
proxy support which lacks things such as authentication. Synaptic
could use such a download manager (let's call it a File Broker) via a
simple messaging facility like DBUS, by which it would send URI's,
destination path, and a configuration mask of some kind that would
denote, among other things, that the file should not be kept in the
queue list after completion. The broker would then commence
downloading to a temp directory, and reply to the caller with progress
statistics and notification once it had finished. When the download is
finished the broker then moves the completed file to the destination
the caller requested.

Browsers, IM's, media players, P2P software, system updaters,  just
about anything could use it, provided someone wrote a protocol handler
for each of their URI type. All those applications would have a more
uniform method of downloading networked files. Plus the efficiency and
resource saves of not having to implement the code to perform
downloads and progress etc. in more than one place.

This file broker could shape the traffic usage based on priorities,
sequence information, and file sizes. Also it could be possible to
resume unfinished files and pause downloads.

The user would then have an applet she could click, upon which a
simple window containing nothing but a list of URI's pending download
and those already processed in a slightly less opaque font. Plus maybe
a selector for default download path, a button to manually add a URI
to the queue, and a button to clean up the list. The completed files
could be clickable so it'd provide a pretty quick way of accessing all
the user's recently downloaded files. Beyond this, extensions could be
made for something like bandwidth throttling, file cacheing (for
LANs), or whatever.

It'd be pretty nifty, would make programming any application that
required some downloading a breeze. Would provide a kind of atomic
method for a Gnome application to retrieve a file, and give the user
more control over how his link is utilized.

Anyway.. I'm just rambling on, and wasting everyone's time with my
pie-in-the-sky dreams.

Henry.

P.S. Reinout, could you CC me when you reply to the list? I get the
list via digests, which makes replying a tad difficult. :-)