Re: [Bug-wget] [Bug-Wget] Issues with Metalink support

[L Walsh]

Steven M. Schweda wrote:
>    In some cases, on some operating systems (VMS, for example), UnZip
> can pre-allocate disk space when extracting an archive member.  It's
> not generally done, because the methods used tend to be OS-specific.
---
Do the posix calls, and if the OS is compliant, it works, if not, then no
worse than today.


>    I'll let you decide what Wget should be doing, but I'd be careful
> about faulty analogies to other programs.
-----
   I wouldn't call them faulty analogies.  In the cases I've seen
w/7.zip, it's extracting from a network drive onto the local drive.
While it is true my network drive is faster than hard disks of 8-10 years
ago, it's still 'downloading' from the net, on to the local machine, so..
not sure why you'd call that faulty...   The theme in common is how many
writes from other processes are likely to come in and reserve space in
the middle of your download. 

FWIW -- I just tried 7z now, and extracting a 6G file to C:/tmp --
it *did go direct*. 

Thing is, some of the things I remember have changed over the years.
So it's hard to say with any given version what does what without
retesting.

For this subject, when downloading in parallel -- if the final size
is known, it sounds like pre-allocating the file would be a good thing.

I know transmission (a torrent client) at least makes that an option
(don't remember if it is default or not) so as to not cause fragmentation --
and it's fill pattern might not be extremely different than running
say, several TCP downloads that would fill the file from different locations.