Development History
Metalink 3.0 was publicly released in 2005. It was designed to aid in downloading Linux ISO images and other large files on release day, when servers would be overloaded (each server would have to be tried manually) and to repair large downloads by replacing only the parts with errors instead of fully re-downloading them. It was initially adopted by download managers, and was used by open source projects such as OpenOffice.org and Linux distributions. A community developed around it, more download programs supported it (including proprietary ones) and it saw commercial adoption. In 2008, the community took their work to the Internet Engineering Task Force which resulted in Metalink 4.0 in 2010, described in a Standards Track RFC. Metalink 3.0 (with the extension .metalink) and Metalink 4.0 (with the extension .meta4) are incompatible because they have a slightly different format. In 2011, another Standards Track RFC described Metalink in HTTP header fields.
Read more about this topic: Metalink
Famous quotes containing the words development and/or history:
“I could not undertake to form a nucleus of an institution for the development of infant minds, where none already existed. It would be too cruel.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“... in America ... children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)