Shibboleth Developers

[Jim Fox <>]

> I disagree. If anything, I think metadatatool should do less, not more.
> Something like curl (or a Java equivalent) will always have much richer
> support for HTTP-based features like this, and we'd be wrong to try and
> duplicate them. I *never* use anything but a wrapper script around
> siterefresh as it is.
>
> Basically, I think this kind of thing needs to be pushed into the metadata
> delivery layer itself or pushed out to something more intelligent, with
> metadata verification left as a small piece sitting in the middle.

We (Univ of Washington) just use curl without metadatatool to
retrieve the metadata files.  Curl supports custom headers,
for example,

  --header "If-Modified-Since: Tue, 22 Nov 2005 18:23:33 GMT"

which skips the download if the target file has not been modified. 
We don't actually use the "if modified" option, as our definition
of hammered probably agrees with Scott's.  It could easily be
put in place though if the target webserver ever did become
encumbered with these requests.

Jim