Parallel / Segmented downloads
 

Just wondering if Parallel / Segmented downloads are in the near future for Phex. This would be one of the greatest features that could be added and does not exist in the other clients.

It would also be great to add crc or md5 for compatable clients, as well as meta data (esp bitrate for music!!)

I totally agree with you there. Except it seems they are pushing this on the GDF community, which I believe a few members were not very receptive to the idea, there was issues that were brought up, that this would be primarily a broad band thing.

I think they should just implement it any way, I dont think it should be that difficult, as they could just divide a file into seperate files temporarily until the file is completed or the user asks it to combine them. Because they are treated as seperate files they can easily be treated like any other files downloading.

In the near future you can't expect functionality like this from us. First we need to solve other problem of Phex. It might take a while until the next big release comes out. But there might be a bug fix release soon with a couple of smaller enhancements.

If the GDF community finally comes up with a specification for segmented download we will integrate it ASAP. Otherwise it will take some time until we will come up with our own solution. But like we already know this might not suit everybody on the network and of the community right away.

Gnutella uses HTTP for file transfer, and programs like GetSmart are able to do it through HTTP, so why is it necesary to be in the specification? I would even think it worst if it was required by the specification as oposed to being at the descretion of the clients and the users.

I didn't say that we are not able to implement it without a specification. But a specification would make things much faster because other people are working on the solution too.

Right now we don't have the time and the resources to do our own thing. Our priorities are somewhere else. This might changes in the future when we have fixed certain problems.

I think it makes no sense to have a client that has many great features but all of them are not implemented right. This hurts the network and scares away the users.

Ok...

Well thats why you make the features *optional* and even turn them off by default if they are that bad. Give users the choice rather then make the choice for users. But this doesnt matter if you dont have the time.

I'm not interested in the 101 excuses that can be brought up not to do this, just the few important ones, like the time constraints and bug fixing priority.

And actually it would be nice if the gnutella specification would support MD5 checking, that would make a world of a diffrence for all parallel downloads, even the non-segmented, every day parallel downloads that most clients do today.