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HowtoDownloadPatches.rst

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Howto Download Patches

This document describes how to download patches from the VA VistA FOIA site.

Approach

Use wget to download files automatically into a local FOIA/ directory mirroring the paths found on the FOIA site. While all options shown are important, note the following in particular:

  • --wait: Delay between downloads to avoid hammering the server.
  • --accept: Download only standard patch files.
  • --force-directories: Store locally using the site directory structure.

Download

Run shell code to generate a list of download URLs and pipe it into a wget invocation as shown here:

{
echo "https://downloads.va.gov/files/FOIA/Software/$file1"
echo "https://downloads.va.gov/files/FOIA/Software/$file2"
} |
wget --continue --input-file=- --recursive --wait=10 --random-wait \
     --user-agent= --execute robots=off --reject 'index.html*' --level=10 \
     --accept '*.GBL,*.GBLs,*.KID,*.KIDs,*.kid,*.TXT,*.txt,*TXTs' \
     --no-parent --force-directories --no-host-directories --cut-dirs=1

Use exactly the wget command-line shown. Vary only the list of URLs. If the download fails intermittently the command may be re-run and it will skip already-fetched files.

Cleanup

Convert text files to LF-only newlines:

find FOIA -regex '.*\.\(GBL\|GBLs\|KID\|KIDs\|kid\|TXT\|TXTs\|txt\)$' -print0 |
xargs -0 fromdos

Convert large files to content links referencing external data:

python Scripts/ConvertToExternalData.py -i FOIA

Files 1 MiB or larger will be renamed to a ".ExternalData_" staging file.

Commit

Add the changes and commit them with the VA as author:

git add FOIA/
git commit --author='US DVA <va.gov>'

Mention in the commit message this instructions file and the shell code used to produce the list of URLs piped to wget. Summarize in the first line of the message the group of patches downloaded.