Dear Maintainer,

Metalink is a standard format (see RFC 5854) for describing how to
download a collection of files.  There is also a standard way to
link to a metalink description (see RFC 6249).

Seemingly upstream wget supports metalink; for example, the wget man
page documents various command-line options to make use of this support:


https://www.gnu.org/software/wget/manual/wget.html#Logging-and-Input-File-Options


Despite this, the version of wget distributed with Debian appears to be
missing any metalink functionality.

When I attempt to use 'wget' to obtain files from their metalink
description, the response indicates that the command-line options are
not understood.  For example:


paul@celebrimbor:~/vtmp$ stat my-data.meta4
  File: my-data.meta4
  Size: 1016            Blocks: 8          IO Block: 4096   regular file
Device: fe02h/65026d    Inode: 11274768    Links: 1
Access: (0644/-rw-r--r--)  Uid: ( 1000/    paul)   Gid: ( 1000/    paul)
Access: 2023-08-28 14:49:38.092156514 +0200
Modify: 2023-08-28 10:44:34.000000000 +0200
Change: 2023-08-28 15:05:33.626905826 +0200
 Birth: 2023-08-28 14:49:34.212047948 +0200
paul@celebrimbor:~/vtmp$ file my-data.meta4
my-data.meta4: XML 1.0 document, ASCII text, with very long lines, with no line terminators
paul@celebrimbor:~/vtmp$ wget --input-metalink=my-data.meta4
wget: unrecognized option '--input-metalink=my-data.meta4'
Usage: wget [OPTION]... [URL]...

Try `wget --help' for more options.
paul@celebrimbor:~/vtmp$


The behaviour suggests that the Debian distributed 'wget' binary was
compiled without including metalink support.  However, this does not
appear to be mentioned in the files within the /usr/share/doc/wget
directory.

Would it be possible to include metalink support in the Debian
distributed wget binary?

Cheers,
Paul.

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tags 1050714 + confirmed
found 1050714 1.24.5-1
severity 1050714 wishlist
thanks

Hello Paul,

Am Montag, dem 28.08.2023 um 15:11 +0200 schrieb Paul Millar:
...

Thank you for your detailed report.
Yes, you are right metalink support is not compiled into the Debian
binary package. The reason is the metalink library
https://github.com/metalink-dev/libmetalink is not packaged for Debian.
When this is available I can enable the configure switch to support it.

Sorry, it will some more time.

Hi Noël,

Thanks for the clear explanation and for suggesting a way forward!

After digging a little, I fear the problem is deeper than this. The
libmetalink library now seems to be unmaintained; see:

     https://github.com/metalink-dev/libmetalink/issues/3

I've opened a bug-report against the upstream wget, asking if the
(apparent) unmaintained nature of libmetalink library is a concern:

     https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?66067

For comparison, wget2 seems to have an in-codebase metalink parser, so
avoiding any dependency on libmetalink.

Thanks!

I think it would make sense to wait, to see how the upstream (wget)
bug-report is resolved before moving forward here.

Cheers,
Paul.