Comment 28 for bug 140458

This is great! Thanks so much! There are 5 minor things that could be done to tweak things.

(1) I'll third the request for partial checksums. These allow downloads to be repaired, which can save users lots of time/bandwidth/frustration instead of restarting a download.

(2) You could serve .metalink files as application/metalink+xml - this will trigger some clients.

(3) I made a wiki page ( https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Metalink ) to match the BitTorrent wiki page linked to on indexes like http://releases.ubuntu.com/8.04/ which currently looks like:

[ ] ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso 23-Apr-2008 02:03 699M Desktop CD for PC (Intel x86) computers (standard download)
[ ] ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso.torrent 24-Apr-2008 08:23 28K Desktop CD for PC (Intel x86) computers (BitTorrent download)
[ ] ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.list 23-Apr-2008 02:03 3.9K Desktop CD for PC (Intel x86) computers (file listing)
[ ] ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.manifest 22-Apr-2008 19:12 31K Desktop CD for PC (Intel x86) computers (contents of live filesystem)
[ ] ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.metalink 24-Apr-2008 08:37 12K Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron)

If it could link to the Metalink wiki page, for people who don't know about metalink downloads yet, that could help. You could also name it filename.extension.metalink to match the filename.extension.torrent naming scheme, but of course that's up to you. :)

[ ] ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.metalink 24-Apr-2008 08:37 12K Desktop CD for PC (Intel x86) computers (Metalink download)

(4) Optionally, you can include the URL to the .torrent in the .metalink. This lets hybrid clients like aria2, GetRight, and KGet (in progress) download from FTP/HTTP and BitTorrent at the same time, while the data downloaded from FTP/HTTP is uploaded to the BitTorrent swarm as well. For ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.metalink, this would look like:

<url type="bittorrent">http://releases.ubuntu.com/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso.torrent</url>

(5) I noticed the publisher section of the metalink points to ubuntu.org - I think you want ubuntu.com unless the two are related (they don't appear to be).

  <publisher>
    <name>Ubuntu</name>
    <url>http://www.ubuntu.org/</url>
  </publisher>