On Thu, 2013-06-20 at 14:43 -0400, Rob Owens wrote: > ----- Original Message ----- > > From: "Conrad Nelson" <y...@marupa.net> > > > > I think the number one reason why Linux package management via > > Torrent > > never took off is because it is frankly an incredibly terrible idea. > > > > Look, peer-to-peer is a great idea on paper, but it has several huge > > strikes against it: > > > > 1. ISPs hate P2P even for legitimate uses, so if a Linux distro would > > go > > torrent on package managers those behind draconian ISPs will be out > > of > > luck, leading to less users. > > > Good point. It would have to be optional so users whose ISPs block > BitTorrent could still access the standard repos. > > > 2. EVERY package will become subject to the "popularity contest" > > problem > > in peer to peer. You'll likely have no problem installing common > > apps, > > but if you like to use something more specialized or obscure but > > still > > tracked in the official repository, you'll be lucky to get a decent > > speed at all, to say nothing about the possibility you'll NEVER get > > the > > package. This is why torrents are fast in theory but dreadfully slow > > in > > practice (I have never in all my time seen a single torrent beat the > > speeds of straight up downloading.) > > > Seems like this could be avoided if the existing repos simply seeded > every file that they host. Then you could always get the files via > BitTorrent even if no other regular users were seeding. Unless I'm > missing something, torrent download speed could not be any slower than > direct download speed, with the exception of the extra time it takes > to contact the tracker and locate peers. >
There is also the possibility to do the same as Blizzard with its updater. They use bittorrent, but as a 'fallback' they use http, there is also a thing called 'http seeding' or 'web seeding' [1], not sure if they use that or some other solution to offer the http download. This means users that have their connections throttled when using bittorrent can still get full speed over http. Imagine all mirrors being part of the same swarm and most/all of them have a tracker (registered with Debian so they are available transparently to the user), they have less strain as a lot of bandwidth can be provided by others and users are still certain of fast downloads (some faster than before if their pipe allows it). This is still a benefit even if people don't seed to the 1:1 ratio, but just while they are downloading. Downside is the added overhead of course, a 100 KB package on it's own will not benefit from this (think a security update in some random small package), but upgrades between versions (6.0 to 7.x or 7.0 to 7.1) might benefit greatly. I thinks it's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure if it's an improvement when considering the complete picture. I think delta's might be a better idea in the shorter term. Some other distributions already do this. Regards, Steven [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent#Web_seeding
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