On Thu, 29 May 2003 13:22:40 -0700, Alex Combas wrote:
> This actually sounds like a pretty good idea to me.
Yay! Time for a crosspost to -developers?
> For gentoo .iso files this would be an exceptionally good idea, since we
> already have servers for those files it would require very little effort
> to post an optional iso.torrent which I would happily use and it would
> deffinitly lessen the load on the servers.
Unless the tracker gets b0rked, but if there are 200k+ downloads at once
the server might be straining as bit anyway :o)
> For big tarballs like openoffice the problem is that OOo would have to
> put up a torrent file for us to use since we get the source from them.
I think it would need a seed mirror somewhere specifically for serving
torrent files. I think however that trackers and .torrent files on this
server could reference binaries elsewhere, eg there could be a
.torrent/tracker at torrent.gentoo.org referencing a oo.tar.bz2 at
downloads.openoffice.org.
There would be no point in serving anything but the big files (>50mb) as
torrents, or anything not commonly used. Things like X or KDE should get a
big boost however. Unfortunatly no open source component projects seems to
be running their own torrents, or it could just be written into the
various ebuild files.
> But this makes me think... hmm... there has to be some servers out there
> that supply torrents.. so what about a possible USE="torrent" flag for
> packages that could be downloaded by torrent? The "torrent" flag would
> NOT affect the ebuild since the ebuild itself doesnt care how the source
> is downloaded, the flag would mostly just be there to warn the user that
> they need to adjust their make.conf file to use something like the
> following to download the file.
>
> FETCHCOMMAND='/usr/bin/btdownloadcurses.py --url ${URI} ${DISTDIR}
I think it would be better implimented by being able to add an extra
mirror type (eg torrent://torrent.gentoo.org) to the GENTOO_MIRRORS
variable and then adding a new BTFETCH='/usr/bin/btdownloadcurses.py --url
${URI} ${DISTDIR}' or similar to tell it how to do it. This way you could
add the torrent://whatever to the first entry in your mirrors list and it
would check there first for an active torrent, before trying anywhere else.
Something to ask the people who deal with maintaining make.conf and that
whole general area, as they will know what will slot in best and where :o)
--
The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds.
The pessimist fears this is true.
22:54:21 up 13 days, 9:20, 1 user, load average: 0.07, 0.29, 0.25
E-mail address munged to prevent spam.
--
[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
