recoverable downloads - opinions sought

[Christopher Faylor]

On Sat, Nov 24, 2001 at 07:23:15AM +1100, Robert Collins wrote:
>To do recoverable downloads we need 2 things.
>1) A way to check the file, other than filesize, for integrity. MD5 will
>do and IIRC that's already caclulated on sources.redhat.
>2) Code to pickup partway through and carry on.
>
>For 2) we can either code it internally, or link statically to something
>like libcurl, or call out to wget/curl.

I don't understand why we need an external library for this.  Isn't this
just a simple "start here when downloading" type of operation?  I know that
the ftp protocol allows this.  I'm not sure about http.

cgf