[Bug-wget] [SPAM] Announcement: Niwt (Nifty Integrated Web Tools)

[Micah Cowan]

Apologies for this off-topic post about a "competing" product. I would
not encourage similar such posts from other members, and am invoking a
dubious claim to special privileges (which I've just now made up) as a
former maintainer of GNU Wget. Reply-To is set to a more appropriate
forum (with temporarily permissive message acceptance).

Alright: I’ve been working my ass off lately on this project, which I
haven’t wanted to say a lot about until i had something reasonable to
show for it. I now feel that I’ve reached this point (barely, and
depending on your point of view). I have mentioned it here and there,
mainly in the form of ideas; and it has its origins in a variety of
ideas that I either came up with or were exposed to during my run as
Wget's maintainer.

Niwt is a project that aims to (eventually) reproduce most of the
functionality of GNU Wget (and some additional), but with a radically
different design philosophy―namely, that it is built entirely around
Unix pipelines, and facilities to easily swap out or extend every
existing piece of functionality with an alternative (or additional)
program that offers equivalent (or improved) functionality. It is
expected that this will result in a big trade-off between, the relative
efficiency, lower resource consumption, and portability to other systems
that Wget enjoys (which Niwt will certainly not), versus extreme and
relatively easy customization. If a highly customizable tool is what you
need, Niwt may (when it’s finished) fit your needs; if efficiency and
general leanness are what is called for, it most likely will not.

In terms of functionality, Niwt has virtually nothing to offer at the
moment. It can download files. It doesn’t have Wget’s automatic
connection recovery (yet), nor does it have timestamping or recursion
(yet). The point of this pre-pre-pre-prerelease is not to demonstrate
what Niwt does, but what it could eventually do, and how it will allow
you to do it. Every bit of Niwt’s operation is open and transparent to
the user, and modifiable in every way.

To find out more about this project, please visit
http://niwt.addictivecode.org/Niwt, and especially
http://niwt.addictivecode.org/TryingOutNiwt to get an idea of how it
works (though that page is best enjoyed with your copy of niwt already
installed, which you can get from
http://niwt.addictivecode.org/InstallingNiwt).

I’ve set up an IRC channel, #niwt @ irc.freenode.net, where I’ll try to
be available when I can, and a users’ discussion mailing list at
http://addictivecode.org/mailman/listinfo/niwt-users/ .

Try it out and let me know what you think! And thank you for your
indulgence.

-- 
Micah J. Cowan
http://micah.cowan.name/