[ On Thursday, February 21, 2002 at 15:17:25 (+0000), Sean Witham wrote: ]
> Subject: fetching after an interupted or corrupted download
>
> 
> With regard to fetching has any thought been given on options such 
> as: make refetch or make forcefetch. The former to continue an 
> interupted download and the latter to wipe any corrupted downloads 
> and start again. I know these things can be done by hand but support 
> in the make files might be more user friendly.

I implemented a form of the latter (i.e. a makefile target to wipe a
corrupted build) for myself.  It's not quite as sophisticated as
FreeBSD's 'distclean' target.  It just does an 'rm ${_CKSUMFILES}', but
it should probably at least re-check the hash(es) and then do 'rm -i'
for the ones that are not actually corrupted, and it should provide the
useful makefile hooks the FreeBSD implementation does too.

> Maybe it is possible 
> for the fetch routines to automatically continue an interupted 
> download by checking the size of the file retrieved, and 
> automatically replace corrupted downloads ?

I'm not so sure the "automatic" part of this is a good idea though.  I'd
rather just be told there's something wrong with the existing distfile,
and then I can do the "make distclean" iff that's the right thing to do,
or maybe try a "make fetch-restart" or something if that might be
possible (which would of course only work if there were a
FETCH_RESTART_ARGS set for the currently used FETCH_CMD, and by default
there would be '-R' for 'ftp' for example)

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

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