Re: An idea for a CGI

[Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

In message <Pine.GSO.3.96.980822043306.25464B-100000@pegasus.rutgers.edu>, elflord@pegasus.rutgers.edu writes:
>On Fri, 21 Aug 1998, Stephanie Lockwood wrote:
>
>> Main parts to this task then: writing the script, choosing the most
>
>the script has two parts: the download and install/uninstall. I can do
>the latter. The former I can not do without some research. 

I recommend wget or something similar: it's a 100k package, and you
can provide it a list of remote files to get. It will attempt retries,
it will restart from where it left off on attempts that fail, it can
work with both ftp or http, it's pretty easy to run and configure,
it's GPL'ed, and it has some more features I haven't remembered here.

ncftp may also do all of these things, I do not know.

Before coming up with a slick little set of utilities that do this,
though, I recommend looking into other approaches for doing the
remote installations. For instance, note that rpm can do file transfers.
Are there any other piggyback-based distribs out there? Can you just grab
their utils?

--Roger