wget/TODO

                                 Hey Emacs, this is -*- outline -*- mode

This is the to-do list for Wget.  There is no timetable of when we plan to
implement these features -- this is just a list of things it'd be nice to see in
Wget.  Patches to implement any of these items would be gladly accepted.  The
items are not listed in any particular order (except that recently-added items
may tend towards the top).  Not all of these represent user-visible changes.

* When spanning hosts, there's no way to say that you are only interested in
  files in a certain directory on _one_ of the hosts (-I and -X apply to all).
  Perhaps -I and -X should take an optional hostname before the directory?

* When simplifying paths, wget needs to stop at any '?' character.

* Add an option to not encode special characters like ' ' and '~' when saving
  local files.  Would be good to have a mode that encodes all special characters
  (as now), one that encodes none (as above), and one that only encodes a
  character if it was encoded in the original URL (e.g. %20 but not %7E).

* --retr-symlinks should cause wget to traverse links to directories too.

* Lots of noncompliant webservers issue HTTP redirects to relative URLs, and
  browsers follow them, so wget should too.

* Make wget return non-zero status in more situations, like incorrect HTTP auth.

* Timestamps are sometimes not copied over on files retrieved by FTP.

* Wget does not currently handle "fragment identifiers" (the part of a URL 
  starting with the '#' character) properly.

* Make -K compare X.orig to X and move the former on top of the latter if 
  they're the same, rather than leaving identical .orig files laying around.

* Allow mirroring of FTP URLs where logging in puts you somewhere else besides 
  '/'. 

* If CGI output is saved to a file, e.g. cow.cgi?param, -k needs to change the
  '?' to a "%3F" in links to that file to avoid passing part of the filename as
  a parameter.

* Make `-k' convert <base href=...> too.

* Make `-k' check for files that were downloaded in the past and convert links 
  to them in newly-downloaded documents.

* -k should convert convert relative references to absolute if not downloaded.

* -k should convert "hostless absolute" URLs, like <A HREF="/index.html">.
  However, Brian McMahon <bm@iucr.org> wants the old incorrect behavior to still
  be available as an option, as he depends on it to allow mirrors of his site to
  send CGI queries to his original site, but still get graphics off of the
  mirror site.  Perhaps this would be better dealt with by adding an option to
  tell -k not to convert certain URL patterns?

* Add option to clobber existing file names (no `.N' suffixes).

* Introduce a concept of "boolean" options.  For instance, every
  boolean option `--foo' would have a `--no-foo' equivalent for
  turning it off.  Get rid of `--foo=no' stuff.  Short options would
  be handled as `-x' vs. `-nx'.

* Implement "thermometer" display (not all that hard; use an
  alternative show_progress() if the output goes to a terminal.)

* Add option to only list wildcard matches without doing the download.

* Add case-insensitivity as an option.

* Handle MIME types correctly.  There should be an option to (not)
  retrieve files based on MIME types, e.g. `--accept-types=image/*'.

* Implement "persistent" retrieving.  In "persistent" mode Wget should
  treat most of the errors as transient.

* Allow time-stamping by arbitrary date.

* Fix Unix directory parser to allow for spaces in file names.

* Allow size limit to files (perhaps with an option to download oversize files 
  up through the limit or not at all, to get more functionality than [u]limit.

* Recognize HTML comments correctly.  Add more options for handling
  bogus HTML found all over the 'net.

* Implement breadth-first retrieval.

* Download to .in* when mirroring.

* Add an option to delete or move no-longer-existent files when mirroring.

* Implement a switch to avoid downloading multiple files (e.g. x and x.gz).

* Implement uploading (--upload URL?) in FTP and HTTP.

* Rewrite FTP code to allow for easy addition of new commands.  It
  should probably be coded as a simple DFA engine.

* Recognize more FTP servers (VMS).

* Make HTTP timestamping use If-Modified-Since facility.

* Implement better spider options.

* Add more protocols (e.g. gopher and news), implementing them in a
  modular fashion.

* Implement a concept of "packages" a la mirror.

* Implement correct RFC1808 URL parsing.

* Implement HTTP cookies.

* Implement more HTTP/1.1 bells and whistles (ETag, Content-MD5 etc.)

* Support SSL encryption through SSLeay or OpenSSL.