#16 Support for chunk checksums in .metalinks

[Ant Bryan]

Support for generating these is in SVN of Metalink tools ( http://prog.infosnel.nl/metalinks/ )

These chunk checksums will allow clients to only re-download parts of a file with errors, instead of the whole thing (very nice for ISOs) and also allow mirrors to be recognized as serving up bad data (if chunks from one mirror keep having errors, that mirror can be discarded).

(If you have comments/suggestions on the format, let me know).

<verification>
<hash type="sha1">example-full-file-sha1-hash</hash>
<pieces type="sha1" length="262144">
<hash piece="0">example-partial-file-sha1-hash</hash>
<hash piece="1">example-partial-file-sha1-hash</hash>
</pieces>
</verification>

[Ant Bryan]

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user_id=1400528
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Support for generating these chunk checksums is in the newly released
metalink tools 0.3.2 ( http://prog.infosnel.nl/metalinks/ ). I've attached
an example .metalink with these chunk checksums.

<verification>
<hash type="md5">640145695ac7506a8357a3abc2ca442e</hash>
<hash type="sha1">7045ca2ff5d69a45fe9ae4eafcc2832338f05e2f</hash>
<pieces length="1048576" type="sha1">
<hash piece="0">e8230ecbc94375b8a4b8e3b8da7d376c09d14d8e</hash>
<hash piece="1">37517b42ed7353eb4b0c59f901d33197778343d9</hash>
<hash piece="2">0e3edbaae7207ee8fb1439304a09c6cd95d01c57</hash>
etc

[Ant Bryan]

example .metalink with chunk checksums

[Ant Bryan]

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All automatically generated .metalinks at http://download.packages.ro/metalink/testing/ have these chunk checksums. The GUI Metalink Editor ( http://hampus.vox.nu/metalink/ ) and CLI ( http://metalinks.sourceforge.net/ ) also include the chunk checksums.

This is one of the most important features because newer users have trouble when their downloads are corrupted.