[Edbrowse-dev] background list

[Edbrowse-dev] background list

[Karl Dahlke]

As per your request, the bgl command lists the background downloads
that you have issued, and gives their status, complete, in progress, or failed.
I can make changes to this command, in its function or its format.
I probably won't use it myself, so I don't have strong feelings about it.

Karl Dahlke

Re: [Edbrowse-dev] background list

[Adam Thompson]

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On Sun, Jan 11, 2015 at 09:11:27AM -0500, Karl Dahlke wrote:
> As per your request, the bgl command lists the background downloads
> that you have issued, and gives their status, complete, in progress, or failed.
> I can make changes to this command, in its function or its format.
> I probably won't use it myself, so I don't have strong feelings about it.

Thanks, format is fine as far as I can see.
Another request would be a way to stop a download,
this would perhaps require adding an id or index to the bgl output.
For example something like:
bgl
in progress {
1 some_large_image.iso
2 a_big_archive.zip
}
bgs 2
download stopped a_big_archive.zip
bgl
in progress {
1 a_large_arimage.iso
}
stopped {
2 a_big_archive.zip
}

There could also possibly be a bgr command to resume it:
bgr 2
download resumed a_big_archive.zip
bgl
in progress {
1 a_large_image.iso
2 a_big_archive.zip
}

Any thoughts?

Cheers,
Adam.

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[Edbrowse-dev] background list

[Karl Dahlke]

> Another request would be a way to stop a download,

It could certainly be done - send that process the suspend signal.
I'm just curious why you might want to do this.
I download one or two large images a year, but maybe that's just me.
I couldn't imagine having several downloads going all at once
and starting and stopping some of them on a whim.
Also not sure at all if the server is terribly happy about a download
that is paused for more than a couple minutes.
I suspect that when you tried to resume it the server would have timed out.
I know this is the case for ftp.
I've seen the "data transfer timeout" parameter
in my ftp server's config file.
In fact, /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.conf (on my machine) currently has

data_connection_timeout=120

Pause for 2 minutes and my server would terminate the download.

Karl Dahlke

Re: [Edbrowse-dev] background list

[Chris Brannon]

Karl Dahlke <eklhad@comcast.net> writes:

> Also not sure at all if the server is terribly happy about a download
> that is paused for more than a couple minutes.

Both ftp and http have mechanisms for resuming a stopped download.
E.G., in http, you can specify a range of bytes to retrieve.
The ftp protocol has had a restart command since RFC 959.
If you use wget for downloading, and you stop a download in the middle,
you can pass --resume to restart it where it left off.
If we were going to implement suspend/resume, we wouldn't just pause the
process with SIGSUSP, we'd terminate it completely, and then restart the
download where it left off, using the appropriate mechanism for the
protocol.  Yep, it's going to add complexity.

The main reason someone would want this feature is intermittent network
connectivity.  It was quite useful back in the days of dialup,
especially when multiple family members shared the same line for voice
and data.  Intermittent connections are still a problem with laptops
that use wifi or cellular tethering.

-- Chris