Metacat

When users click on the Download All button in MetacatUI, we call MN.getPackage() to zip up the members, create HTML and PDF metadata, etc. For very large packages, the packaging time is far too long for a decent user experience. To address this, we may need to provide some sort of progress API call that allows the client to get estimated packaging time and provide a progress bar for the user. Also, getPackage() uses File.createTempFile() to copy contents into a single directory tree for zipping (really BagIt bagging). This doesn't scale well for large packages (GBs). We can explore a few strategies to mitigate this. One that comes to mind is using hard symbolic links to the original data files in the directory tree rather than copying them. This needs some thought, but ultimately we need to speed up the packaging process for large packages.