Downloads all version manifests regardless of options

[kevinthegreat1]

I am trying to run this with ./gradlew run --args="--mappings=yarn --only-stable --min-version=1.20.4", which should only be 4 versions (1.20.4, 1.20.5, 1.20.6, and 1.21), but it's trying to download all of the version manifests, which is taking a very long time. I can't even get to the later steps because it times out due to my bad internet connection. I hope it doesn't try to download all the mappings too.

Other than that thanks for this great tool!

[WinPlay02]

Thanks for the feedback.

1. At the moment, the version graph needs the information of the manifest to build the graph and then decide, which version to eliminate from the graph. This could potentially be made more efficient in certain cases, but I can neither promise any fast progress on that nor that it can be done in all cases. But this should only really be a problem on the first startup, as the downloaded meta files can be reused for subsequent runs.
2. No, the mappings are only downloaded if they are really needed (as are any other files).

[0x189D7997]

But this should only really be a problem on the first startup, as the downloaded meta files can be reused for subsequent runs.

This is actually an issue when using non-official v1 manifests such as Skyrising. v1 root manifests do not have checksums for each version. If there is no checksum the application cannot know if a version manifest was updated and re-downloads every single one (and version details if present) on every single run, without a way to change this behavior from config or args. While ensuring no manifests are outdated this approach wastes a lot of time and traffic.

I can suggest three ways of solving this but I'm not sure which are actually viable:

• Only re-download needed manifests (ones for requested versions) on subsequent runs , it doesn't really matter if the manifests are outdated when building version graphs.
• Instead of downloading right away send If-Modified-Since requests and re-download only the updated manifests.
• Add a config option and CLI argument for this and set it to not re-download anything by default. If user needs up-to-date manifests they can use this option once needed, refreshing the data in the cache.

Edit: now I see this is a long-running issue and it is not likely that Skryrising manifest will have hashes added any time soon.
Another potential solution is to use the HTTP ETag header, I will see if I can implement that.