Fedora metalink files

[Andre Robatino]

One of the selling points of using metalink files is that they can contain block
checksums which allows repairing corrupted downloads (by re-downloading the bad
blocks). If I understand the metalink man page, the only way to do this is to
add the "sha1pieces" -d option. Fedora metalinks are of the form

http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/metalink?path=pub/fedora/linux/releases/14/Fedora/i386/iso/Fedora-14-i386-DVD.iso

and appear to only contain a single sha256, like the regular checksum files.
This means that it would only be possible to detect a bad download, but not
repair it. Another tool such as rsync or BitTorrent would be needed for this. Is
this intentional? Note that it's possible to include more than one digest, for
example "-d sha256 -d sha1pieces" (in case sha1 being weaker is a problem), but
I don't know if it always checks all digest types or just one of them.