How to retrieve a list of files of given repository (MirrorBrain)?

The repository I am asking is for Linux, but my problem is related to client -- i.e. with retrieving those data, and client can be Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, etc. So I opted against asking this question on Unix&Linux site, if admins feel it should be U&L question please move it to the other site.

Consider such reposi开发者_如何学编程tory as http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/LCD/openSUSE_11.4/x86_64/ -- you can fetch the html for it, parse it, and get the list of files. However I hardly believe it is correct way -- since the html is created by website engine (MirrorBrain in this case), there should be some web service API to get this list directly.

I googled, but didn't find anything relevant.

So -- how to get the list of the file directly, no parsing, just call, and getting the collection of file names.

MirrorBrain doesn't have an API call to retrieve a list of files. (It only has API calls to retrieve a list of mirrors for a single file, by appending .mirrorlist or .meta4 to a file's URL.) It would be a worthwhile idea to add such an api call (patches welcome!).

So there's only the standard HTTP server directory index to read a file list from. The format varies from server to server, and even Apache has different variants. With Apache, a little trick that can help is to append ?F=0 to the directory URL if you want to get only the filenames (it will simplify the index), or to append ?F=1 to switch to the fancier variant which includes more details.

Hope this helps.