GNU Wget 1.9 has been released

[Hrvoje Niksic]

GNU Wget 1.9 is now available.  Get it from:

    ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/wget/wget-1.9.tar.gz

or from one of the mirror sites; see the list at
http://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html.

GNU Wget is a free utility for non-interactive download of files from
the Web.  It supports HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP protocols, as well as
retrieval through HTTP proxies.

It can follow links in HTML pages and create local versions of remote
web sites, fully recreating the directory structure of the original
site.  This is sometimes referred to as "recursive downloading."
While doing that, Wget respects the Robot Exclusion Standard
(/robots.txt).  Wget can be instructed to convert the links in
downloaded HTML files to the local files for offline viewing.

Please send bug reports to <address@hidden>.

* Changes in Wget 1.9.

** It is now possible to specify that POST method be used for HTTP
requests.  For example, `wget --post-data="id=foo&data=bar" URL' will
send a POST request with the specified contents.

** IPv6 support is available, although it's still experimental.

** The `--timeout' option now also affects DNS lookup and establishing
the TCP connection.  Previously it only affected reading and writing
data.  Those three timeouts can be set separately using
`--dns-timeout', `--connection-timeout', and `--read-timeout',
respectively.

** Download speed shown by the progress bar is based on the data
recently read, rather than the average speed of the entire download.
The ETA projection is still based on the overall average.

** It is now possible to connect to FTP servers through FWTK
firewalls.  Set ftp_proxy to an FTP URL, and Wget will automatically
log on to the proxy as "address@hidden".

** The new option `--retry-connrefused' makes Wget retry downloads
even in the face of refused connections, which are otherwise
considered a fatal error.

** The new option `--dns-cache=off' may be used to prevent Wget from
caching DNS lookups.

** Wget no longer escapes characters in local file names based on
whether they're appropriate in URLs.  Escaping can still occur for
nonprintable characters or for '/', but no longer for frequent
characters such as space.  You can use the new option
--restrict-file-names to relax or strengthen these rules, which can be
useful if you dislike the default or if you're downloading to
non-native partitions.

** Handling of HTML comments has been dumbed down to conform to what
users expect and other browsers do: instead of being treated as SGML
declaration, a comment is terminated at the first occurrence of "-->".
Use `--strict-comments' to revert to the old behavior.

** Wget now correctly handles relative URIs that begin with "//", such
as "//img.foo.com/foo.jpg".

** Boolean options in `.wgetrc' and on the command line now accept
values "yes" and "no" along with the traditional "on" and "off".

** It is now possible to specify decimal values for timeouts, waiting
periods, and download rate.  For instance, `--wait=0.5' now works as
expected, as does `--dns-timeout=0.5' and even `--limit-rate=2.5k'.