news

wget (command line browser) source code

GNU Wget NEWS -- history of user-visible changes.

Copyright (C) 1997, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
See the end for copying conditions.

Please send GNU Wget bug reports to <[e-mail]>.

* Wget 1.9.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.

* Changes in Wget 1.9.

** It is now possible to specify that POST method be used for HTTP
requests.  For example, `wget --post-data="id=foo&data=bar" URL' will
send a POST request with the specified contents.

** IPv6 support is available, although it's still experimental.

** The `--timeout' option now also affects DNS lookup and establishing
the TCP connection.  Previously it only affected reading and writing
data.  Those three timeouts can be set separately using
`--dns-timeout', `--connection-timeout', and `--read-timeout',
respectively.

** Download speed shown by the progress bar is based on the data
recently read, rather than the average speed of the entire download.
The ETA projection is still based on the overall average.

** It is now possible to connect to FTP servers through FWTK
firewalls.  Set ftp_proxy to an FTP URL, and Wget will automatically
log on to the proxy as "username@host".

** The new option `--retry-connrefused' makes Wget retry downloads
even in the face of refused connections, which are otherwise
considered a fatal error.

** The new option `--dns-cache=off' may be used to prevent Wget from
caching DNS lookups.

** Wget no longer escapes characters in local file names based on
whether they're appropriate in URLs.  Escaping can still occur for
nonprintable characters or for '/', but no longer for frequent
characters such as space.  You can use the new option
--restrict-file-names to relax or strengthen these rules, which can be
useful if you dislike the default or if you're downloading to
non-native partitions.

** Handling of HTML comments has been dumbed down to conform to what
users expect and other browsers do: instead of being treated as SGML
declaration, a comment is terminated at the first occurrence of "-->".
Use `--strict-comments' to revert to the old behavior.

** Wget now correctly handles relative URIs that begin with "//", such
as "//img.foo.com/foo.jpg".

** Boolean options in `.wgetrc' and on the command line now accept
values "yes" and "no" along with the traditional "on" and "off".

** It is now possible to specify decimal values for timeouts, waiting
periods, and download rate.  For instance, `--wait=0.5' now works as
expected, as does `--dns-timeout=0.5' and even `--limit-rate=2.5k'.

* Wget 1.8.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.

* Wget 1.8.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.

* Changes in Wget 1.8.

** A new progress indicator is now available and used by default.
You can choose the progress bar type with `--progress=TYPE'.  Two
types are available, "bar" (the new default), and "dot" (the old
dotted indicator).  You can permanently revert to the old progress
indicator by putting `progress = dot' in your `.wgetrc'.

** You can limit the download rate of the retrieval using the
`--limit-rate' option.  For example, `wget --limit-rate=15k URL' will
tell Wget not to download the body of the URL faster than 15 kilobytes
per second.

** Recursive retrieval and link conversion have been revamped:

*** Wget now traverses links breadth-first.  This makes the
calculation of depth much more reliable than before.  Also, recursive
downloads are faster and consume *significantly* less memory than
before.

*** Links are converted only when the entire retrieval is complete.
This is the only safe thing to do, as only then is it known what URLs
have been downloaded.

*** BASE tags are handled correctly when converting links.  Since Wget
already resolves <base href="..."> when resolving handling URLs, link
conversion now makes the BASE tags point to an empty string.

*** HTML anchors are now handled correctly.  Links to an anchor in the
same document (<a href="#anchorname">), which used to confuse Wget,
are now converted correctly.

*** When in page-requisites (-p) mode, no-parent (-np) is ignored when
retrieving for inline images, stylesheets, and other documents needed
to display the page.

*** Page-requisites (-p) mode now works with frames.  In other words,
`wget -p URL-THAT-USES-FRAMES' will now download the frame HTML files,
and all the files that they need to be displayed properly.

** `--base' now works conjunction with `--input-file', providing a
base for each URL and thereby allowing the URLs in the file to be
relative.

** If a host has more than one IP address, Wget uses the other
addresses when accessing the first one fails.

** Host directories now contain port information if the URL is at a
non-standard port.

** Wget now supports the robots.txt directives specified in
<http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots-rfc.txt>.

** URL parser has been fixed, especially the infamous overzealous
quoting.  Wget no longer dequotes reserved characters, e.g. `%3F' is
no longer translated to `?', nor `%2B' to `+'.  Unsafe characters
which are not reserved are still escaped, of course.

** No more than 20 successive redirections are allowed.

* Wget 1.7.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.

* Changes in Wget 1.7.

** SSL (`https') pages now work if you compile Wget with SSL support;
use the `--with-ssl' configure flag.  You need to have OpenSSL
installed.

** Cookies are now supported.  Wget will accept cookies sent by the
server and return them in later requests.  Additionally, it can load
and save cookies to disk, in the same format that Netscape uses.

** "Keep-alive" (persistent) HTTP connections are now supported.
Using keep-alive allows Wget to share one TCP/IP connection for
many retrievals, making multiple-file downloads faster and less
stressing for the server and the network.

** Wget now recognizes FTP directory listings generated by NT and VMS
servers.

** It is now possible to recurse through FTP sites where logging in
puts you in some directory other than '/'.

** You may now use `~' to mean home directory in `.wgetrc'.  For
example, `load_cookies = ~/.netscape/cookies.txt' works as you would
expect.

** The HTML parser has been rewritten.  The new one works more
reliably, allows finer-grained control over which tags and attributes
are detected, and has better support for some features like correctly
skipping comments and declarations, decoding entities, etc.  It is
also more general.

** <meta name="robots"> tags are now respected.

** Wget's internal tables now use hash tables instead of linked lists
where appropriate.  This results in huge speedups when retrieving
large sites (thousands of documents).

** Wget now has a man page, automatically generated from the Texinfo
documentation.  (The last version that shipped with a man page was
1.4.5).  To get this, you need to have pod2man from the Perl
distribution installed on your system.

* Changes in Wget 1.6

** Administrative changes.

*** Maintainership.  Due to Hrvoje being plagued with a "real job",
Dan Harkless is the most active maintainer (not that he doesn't have a
real job as well).  Hrvoje still participates occasionally, and both
are being helped by many other people.

*** Web page.  Thanks to Jan Prikryl, Wget has an "official" web page.
Take a look at:

    http://sunsite.dk/wget/

*** Anonymous CVS.  Thanks to ever-helpful Karsten Thygesen, Wget
sources are now available at an anonymous CVS server.  Take a look at
the web page for downloading instructions.

** New -K / --backup-converted / backup_converted = on option causes files
modified due to -k to be saved with a .orig prefix before being changed.  When
using -N as well, it is these .orig files that are compared against the server.

** New --follow-tags / follow_tags = ... option allows you to restrict
Wget to following only certain HTML tags when doing a recursive
retrieval.  -G / --ignore-tags / ignore_tags = ... is just the
opposite -- all tags but the ones you specify will be followed.

** New --waitretry / waitretry = SECONDS option allows waiting between retries
of failed downloads.  Wget will use "linear" backoff, waiting 1 second after the
first failure, 2 after the second, up to SECONDS.  waitretry is set to 10 by
default in the system wgetrc.

** New -p / --page-requisites / page_requisites = on option causes
Wget to download all ancillary files necessary to display a given HTML
page properly (e.g. inlined images).

** New -E / --html-extension / html_extension = on option causes Wget
to append ".html" to text/html filenames not ending in regexp
"\.[Hh][Tt][Mm][Ll]?".

** New type of .wgetrc command -- "lockable Boolean".  Can be set to on, off,
always, or never.  This allows the .wgetrc to override the commandline.  So far,
passive_ftp is the only .wgetrc command which takes a lockable Boolean.

** A number of new translation files have been added.

** New --bind-address / bind_address = <address> option for people on hosts 
bound to multiple IP addresses.

** wget now accepts (illegal per HTTP spec) relative URLs in HTTP redirects.

* Wget 1.5.3 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.

* Wget 1.5.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.

* Wget 1.5.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.