Thanks Brion, very neat.
One more question: it would be nice if each project also wrote a line to a global log that
is publicly accessable.
People could monitor this to detect that a dump has started and how much progress has been
made.
E.g. at
http://download.wikimedia.org/dumpprogress.txt
2005-Sep-03 12:18:30 special commons / completed normally
2005-Sep-03 12:27:10 special sources / completed normally
2005-Sep-03 12:39:12 wikiquote ab / completed normally
2005-Sep-03 12:39:23 wikiquote ac / completed normally
2005-Sep-03 12:40:23 wikiquote ae
Cheers, Erik Zachte