looking for wget-like module for getching software

[Robert P. J. Day]

  just getting started with python, and i'm designing a program for
fetching software from the net, given the package name, version
number and/or date stamp, download method (tarball, CVS, etc.) and so
on.  i've already got a shell script doing this, but python would
certainly clean up the code a lot.

  first question -- does such a utility/module (or something like it)
already exist?  that is, with the ability to say, "go get me gcc,
version 3.4.3, as a tarball"?  or "go get me glibc, CVS date stamp
xxxx, from that CVS repo"?

  as for the second question, the driving force behind a fair bit of
the current program is "wget", which has the ability to search
recursively and bring back a file of a given name (which "curl"
doesn't appear to have).

  that is, i can just say, "go get file gcc-3.4.2.tar.bz2", and start
searching at "ftp://pub.gnu.org/pub/gcc".  i may not know how far down
in the directory structure that file is, but wget will happily search
recursively until it finds it.

  so, any pointers to python utils/modules that do any or all of the
above?  thanks.

rday