On Fri, 28 Jun 2013 10:13:33 +0200
Robert Mayr <robyduck(a)fedoraproject.org> wrote:
Hi,
I have no idea what the metalink on our get-fedora-all page [1] stands
for. The link we have there is the standard ISO link, I suppose it
comes from older versions of Fedora.
If someone is aware about this, do we still need the Metalink or has
it become pretty useless?
Thanks.
Cheers
[1]
http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora-all
Metalinks are an xml wrapper around a content that provides some metadata for it.
If you look at:
http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/metalink?path=pub/fedora/linux/releases/...
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<metalink version="3.0"
xmlns="http://www.metalinker.org/"
type="dynamic" pubdate="Fri, 28 Jun 2013 15:14:21 GMT"
generator="mirrormanager"
xmlns:mm0="http://fedorahosted.org/mirrormanager">
<files>
<file name="Fedora-18-x86_64-DVD.iso">
<mm0:timestamp>1357930010</mm0:timestamp>
<size>4573888512</size>
<verification>
<hash
type="sha256">91c5f0aca391acf76a047e284144f90d66d3d5f5dcd26b01f368a43236832c03</hash>
</verification>
<resources maxconnections="1">
<url protocol="http" type="http" location="US"
preference="100"
...all the rest of mirrors with this content...
So, it gives you the sha256 of the file, and what mirrors have it in a list.
If your download software handles metalinks it can check checksum for you automatically,
it can try and grab chunks from many different mirrors at once, and
it can failover to the next mirror if one is down/slow.
More info at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalink
All that said, I don't know how many people use these...
kevin