wget waitretry PATCH

Here is a small, ugly patch.  I intended to clean this up and submit
it long ago but so much for intentions.  With the short deadline for
feature freeze, I want to get this in ASAP.  This patch is against the
second release of wget-1.10-alpha1.  This modifies the semantics of the
"waitretry" command line option so that it specifies exactly the number
of seconds to wait before retrying.

I believe if wget is called with "--waitretry=5", then the seconds
waited between succesive attempts to get a file will be 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,
5, 5...  seconds.  However, there are situations where this behavior is
not desired.  For example, a couple stations I deal with have a buggy FTP
server which requires me to wait 8 minutes between attempts.  Hitting the
server any more frequently will trigger a bug in the server's code and
and will prevent me from resuming the download of the file.  Using the
original semantics for --waitretry=480 simply will not work for me.

I think the correct approach would be to implement my semantics for
--waitretry, and to introduce a new switch such as --waitretrylimit
for the current behavior.  Thus the user has the option of a fixed wait
between retries of a file, or a linear backoff on waits before retries.
The man page explanation of the current behavior is misleading, in that
it implies that --waitretry=10 will have a maximum wait of 55 seconds.
If --tries=20 is also specified, then the current implementation would
have a maximum wait of 1+2+3+...+9+10+10+...+10 = 155 seconds.  Again,
documentation and change log is missing.  This can be developed if the
idea is accepted.

Thanks for your consideration.

Jim Wright
Data Flow/Archive Software Engineer
Plate Boundary Observatory

--- wget-1.10-alpha1/src/retr.c	2005-03-20 08:07:40.000000000 -0700
+++ wget-1.10-alpha1-JRW/src/retr.c	2005-04-05 15:40:13.859803926 -0600
@@ -879,12 +879,17 @@
 
   if (opt.waitretry && count > 1)
     {
+#ifdef ORIGINAL_WAITRETRY
       /* If opt.waitretry is specified and this is a retry, wait for
 	 COUNT-1 number of seconds, or for opt.waitretry seconds.  */
       if (count <= opt.waitretry)
 	xsleep (count - 1);
       else
 	xsleep (opt.waitretry);
+#else
+      /* change semantics so waitretry specifies exactly the seconds between retries */
+      xsleep (opt.waitretry);
+#endif
     }
   else if (opt.wait)
     {