[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

jigdo 0.5.2



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
  ¯ ´` ¯

Attachment: pgpVkRdqIxxin.pgp
Description: PGP signature


Reply to: