Hi
Just to reply to a number of your points.
I'm not familiar with all of the protocols, but have a basic understanding of the hasing techniques used by one particular client. It involves generating multiple MD4 hashes for smaller pieces and for larger pieces, and the hashes for the larger pieces are hashed again to generate a file hash, and then the information is simply collected in a url, and the rest of the work is done by the network. For this particular client, or class of clients using a similar technique, it shouldn't involve any software beyond a short program, to be achieved in many common languages such as C, Perl, PHP, and so on. If this program could be injected at or integrated with the initial mirror copy stage, it could avoid reading the file twice. Otherwise it could be standalone and kicked off only after a transfer has completed.
If you mean that the mirror servers should also provide access to the content via the protocol, well yes that would be one ideal. But I was merely asking for the meta data to be supported, not the entire protocol. That would take longer to achieve.
This would be a way to allow multiple protocols but this needs a working proof of concept before anything can be implemented.
Something is "proven", but the other methods weren't even tried?
The problem was that even BitTorrent distribution was difficult to organise. I myself only joined this sub-project as I volunteered to give it a push to get it organised - i lack the technical expertise to run the servers myself. Even then it is not where I would ideally like it to be, due to resources. Only the ed2k protocol has been tried otherwise, but even then this has not been updated for some time. The only way for protocols to be tried is for someone to volunteer to help set this up, and the only protocol with interest is BitTorrent.
'Proven' occurred in the sense that other projects have used it successfully, and that we can control the source of the files.
As for 'piracy', BT can be used for copyright infringement as well, but the torrents and tracker can be set up and kept separate from others which do distribute these types of files.
It's reasonable to forsee the same thing happening to P2P within 1-3 years, that meta clients become the norm, that is if the technology isn't outlawed.
I would hope that this could be the case too. I think Shareaza itself is a gnutella(?)-bittorrent client. However I would believe on how "useful" each protocol is to a particular project. It may be the case of we might distribute on one, and then (if the clients allow sharing over multiple protocols) get the clients to forward the file on multiple networks.
One general area where I am lacking overall experience would be a comparative study of the short-term and long-term (both absolute and relative to file age before obsolescence) efficiency of the various P2P and server protocols, and hybrid mixtures thereof.
I'm a bit confused by what you mean here. Is this a measure of how useful P2P distribution would be versus HTTP/FTP distribution? I would imagine that this would only be useful when (a) traditional server load is the highest, (b) in 'rare' files with limited bandwidth servers or (c) very large files.
Ideally when I offer such an idea, I would also couple it with ability to implement and access to systems or personnel, and time to see it through, but that isn't the case right now. I've offered enough ideas (here and elsewhere combined), and am trying to focus on doing something about them. :-) But if someone else sees the idea and likes it, or even part of it, then they can tweak it if they want, and run with it.
I appreciate this, and your contributions are greatly appreciated. Unfortunately it is just a fact that with the resources we have ideas like this will not be implemented without someone behind it. Hopefully someone will pick this up and get it organised eventually.
I realise that you seem to be busy with other projects at the moment, and that your ideas may not realised in the short term. But please feel free to contribute more on the list in the future if you have any ideas, and you may even find someone to help with your ideas. And you can hopefully help with our future distribution of OpenOffice.org 2.0 as well!!
With best regards Deepankar P2P Sub-project
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