As far as I have been able to find out the best way to download Debian Sarge ISO images is using the jigdo downloader.

I've installed jigdo and is running good so far, it is able to pause, stop & resume the download and I doesn't seem to brake in any way.

But as always there's a caveat and something that gets me pretty dissapointed being jigdo the mayor distribution method for what by far could probably be the best Linux distribution available.

Is the fact that once you start the download and even when the application prints out a lot of information to the screen there's basically no way to find out what's the progress of your download.

Apparently everytime you start a download session jigdo tells you the amount of files left to finish but if you didn't write down the amount of files that the ISO was made of you're lost.

Is there a way to get this kind of stats from jigdo?

Right now I'm moving from Red Hat 9 to Woody.

I already made the change on my non production machine and I'm pretty satisfied not to say totally in love with it. But I'm the kind of person that has to live a little bit closer to the edge and that's why I rather use Sarge.

Now here's the scenario: I live in a third world country and I don't have broadband at home, so it's definitely better for me (less frustrating) to go through a lenghty download just once and use the CD's instead of downloading every package I want.

Now my brother does have broadband at his place, so what I want to do is take 1 of my machines to his place, plug it in and automate all the download process.

Maybe use a couple of cron jobs to stop downloading in rush hours so he can make use of some bandwith during the day and resume the download at night.

So far so good, and maybe you can see where I'm leading here.

It would be very handy if I could have access to some statistics about the downloading progress every once in a while, stuff like

Total Files of the Image

Hourly Daily and Weekly History of:

Files:
Total Downloaded
Total Remaining
Download duration
Bandwith Usage
% Completed

Images:
Total Downloaded
Total Remaining
Download duration
Bandwith Usage
% Completed

They could be logged and emailed to me so I can be aware of the progress or maybe even published on my website

Perhaps a better understanding of jigdo may help but won't solve your problem. Jigdo works off 2 files .jigdo and .template and once you have those it grabs the packages off the local mirror. Since it it is working off the package list is grabs the files that are available. If there is a problem with a file it skips it and comes back later. In a nutshell this is not a single download but a download comprised of hundreds of different pieces. There is no way it could logically determine the % left or the time as many of the pieces are of different size. As a guide I can download a jigdo iso in about 3 hours using 512K.

I definitely understand that we're not talking about a single download.

A single download would just be downloading the entire ISO Image as any other file one could download over the Internet, like the ones offered at LinuxISO.com

I also know that jigdo uses this two special files (.jigdo and .template) as it's guide to assemble the Image, I don't certainly know all the details behind the structure of these two files but if they're meant to tell the jigdo engine how to assemble the Image and what files to grab, I can imagine they're setup in a way that they know the grand total of files the Image is made of.

If they know the list of files and the total files, Couldn't they be able to know or at lest find out the size in MB of each and every of these files?

If they could I don't see a reason why it would be logically impossible to calculate the %completed, plus the other stats I mentioned.