David H. wrote: <snip>
so ans an _unofficial_ service I was thinking about adding a Fink torrent tracker for Fink related files and source files you need to install packages with fink (the command line tool fink).
The knee-jerk reaction to a proposal to use BitTorrent is: "but what if no one is seeding the file(s) you need?" Considering the large number of packages currently in Fink, I think this is a valid concern: it is probably unreasonable to expect that all of the source files for all of the packages will always have at least 1 seeder, particularly the older packages whose original download sites have gone away. If a package is so unpopular its source files are no longer available, how likely is it that someone will be sharing those sources?
One possibility would be to have a set of "mirrors" that continually provide all of the package sources. "Popular" sources would gain the bandwidth/availability benefits that BitTorrent provides, while more obscure ones would still be available to those who needed them. Unfortunately, this isn't much more efficient than the current setup: for BitTorrent to be truly effective, you need a large base of "volunteers" to help seed files. Running a BT client is fairly resource intensive (clients eat up both RAM and CPU time, at least on my machine), so it's not feasible for the average user to share a whole bunch of sources.
I guess all my rambling can be summed up thusly: how are you going to ensure seeders for the source files?
(Don't get me wrong: I love the idea of using BitTorrent this way, but I'm not sure that it's actually suited to the task at hand.)
-- eric
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