Hello all, Jigsaw Download 0.5.2 has been released. jigdo is my proposed replacement for the pseudo image kit. As always, please try this out and give me feedback! I finally got around to writing some documentation, but found it very hard to describe in a nutshell what jigdo does. Do any questions remain when you read the following introduction? Jigsaw Download, or short jigdo, is a scheme developed primarily to make it easy to distribute huge filesystem images (e.g. CD (ISO9660) or DVD (UDF) images) over the internet, but it could also be used for other data which is awkward to handle due to its size, like audio/video files or large software packages. jigdo tries to ensure that the large file (always called image from now on) is downloaded in small parts which can be stored on different servers. People who want to download the image do so using the jigdo(1) (NOT IMPLEMENTED YET) download tool. jigdo-file is used to prepare the files for download. What makes jigdo special is that the parts that are used to reconstruct the image can have any size and content - they only need to be contained in a contiguous region anywhere in the image. For example, if you wish to distribute an ISO9660 image which contains a snapshot of an FTP server, you can instruct jigdo-file to prepare the download data in such a way that when people use jigdo to download the image, jigdo actually fetches the individual files from the FTP server and assembles them into an exact copy of your image - during the download! (If the image is not a filesystem dump, you can use split(1) to create the small parts that the image will be reassembled from.) You are completely free to choose where the individual parts of the image are stored: They may be in entirely different directories on different servers (e.g. because of storage/bandwidth constraints), but this is invisible to the people downloading your image, who only tell jigdo to download one `.jigdo' file. The complete docs are in the manpage for jigdo-file, which I also put up at <http://atterer.net/jigdo/jigdo-file.html>. What's new in 0.5.2? ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ - Would you believe it, documentation!!! (in the form of a manpage) - "print-missing" sub-command for jigdo-file allows for mirror selection etc - more than the old PIK's functionality is now present - Major internal extensions (nearly 2000 lines of code) which don't show now, but which will eventually come in handy for the GUI tool Still to do ~~~~~~~~~~~ - Implement MD5 sum cache (--cache) - this is currently the showstopper preventing me from setting up a beta jigdo site for Debian CD images. - Make it work with gcc-3.0 (identified the problem now) - Make jigdo-file compilable with mingw32 to produce a Windows version (already /almost/ works, but still some work to do...) - (in the more distant future:) Write GTK+ download app, port that to Windows I need your help! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Does anybody out there have any experience with coding cross-platform GUI applications? Even if you don't want to lend me a hand coding (you would be most welcome!), it would be very useful if I had an expert or two who I could turn to if any problems come up. The source is available from <http://atterer.net/debian/>, or for aptable i386 debs use: deb http://home.in.tum.de/atterer/debian unstable jigdo Enjoy, Richard -- __ _ |_) /| Richard Atterer | CS student at the Technische | GnuPG key: | \/¯| http://atterer.net | Universität München, Germany | 0x888354F7 ¯ ´` ¯
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