[wpkg-users] Replace xmlhttp download with curl/wget

[heiko.helmle at horiba.com]

Hello,

While wondering why <download> is so slow, i looked around.

The problem with WSH and URL downloads is:
* It's a kludge. That's why it's documented as "should not use"
* It even can crash the CMD-window WPKG runs in.
* It works only with HTTP
* It loads the file completely into memory before dumping it to disk. 
(wasteful)

So maybe we could (optionally) have an external tool handle the "download" 
tag - curl or wget are excellent specialised (and free/GPL) tools.

Pros:
* much more robust than the WSH download method
* saves memory
* faster (probably because of the memory savings)
* Support not only for HTTP, but FTP too.

Cons: 
* WPKG would rely on an external binary (so it's foreign code, but at 
least no license problems)

Why downloading anyway:
2 reasons:
* I don't want installations to stall/fail in the middle of the (critical) 
process just because the network goes down (mobile users tend to be pretty 
mobile sometimes)
* some Installers (especially MSI)  are for some reasons really really 
slow and use huge network resources (10x the actual size) when run over 
SMB. They work fine when run from local storage.

What do you think?

Best Regards
        Heiko Helmle
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.wpkg.org/pipermail/wpkg-users/attachments/20110714/613e3505/attachment-0001.html>