On Feb 23, 2006, at 4:22 PM, Edward Faulkner wrote:
On Fri, Feb 24, 2006 at 11:13:35AM +1100, Geoff Crompton wrote:
When you say "The server runs a tracker", are you explaining
bittorrent,
or do the security.debian.org servers actually run a tracker at
the moment?
I was just explaining bittorrent. Sorry for the confusion.
How well does bittorrent work for smaller files? I was always
under the
(possibly mistaken) impression that it worked really well for iso
sized
images (and larger) because the size allowed plenty of time for the
chunks to get distributed well through out the network.
You're probably right. If the files are too small, the overhead
dominates.
FYI, there is an apt-torrent program, googled and located at http://
sianka.free.fr/
Since we are talking of writing new software anyways, either for
bittorrent or multicast, instead of a torrent for each individual
package, there could be a torrent file for the entire current
archive. Perhaps in addition to the Packages and Release files, a
torrent file could be that mentions the entire archive.
The question becomes, is this system used to install software, or
mirror it. Mirrors would enjoy this, but would mean changing the
debian mirroring infrastructure. For installations, in becomes more
difficult I believe.
The way I see apt-get work, is it queries a server for a copy of a
file, waits for it to arrive, and then get the next. This would be
bad download performance in a bittorrent environment. If apt could
request the local daemon for all the files it wants, and get them in
any order.
*Idea*
If the bittorrent source of the apt was the first to be queried, if
it did not have the package yet, it would 404, allowing apt to go
onto the next source. BUT, it would then note the name of the
package requested, and start to always try and have the most recent
copy of that package around. Therefore if the following week, and
update was released, the bittorrent source would notice a new version
of the package available, and download it.
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