Hi dmalloc,
This is a good idea, but I'm not sure it's really optimal. BitTorrent is great for large, popular, individual files; so if there are a few Fink dist-files that are constantly being downloaded by many users, it could help that. But it's infeasible to keep dozens of torrents open for a very long period, mostly because of CPU usage--so BT is very bad at making all the files I have sitting around in /sw/src available to others. For files that are rarely used, it's useless.
Other P2P systems (gnutella, Lopster aka OpenNap, mlnet, openFT) are much better at this. I'm not sure about their scriptability though--I guess the openFT interface protocol/libgiFT could be used to script it, and TekNap gives a scripty interface to OpenNap.
Where BitTorrent could be good for Fink is anywhere there's very high demand for the exact same thing. Eg:
1) Big announcements. If we say "KDE 4 is added to stable", and put up a torrent for folks to download all the .debs, that could be useful.
2) ISOs. If we ever make a Fink CD, it's definitely the best way to distribute.
If you are interested in doing dist-file distribution however, I'd love to see auto-downloading of dist-files from openFT, with some kind of configurable sharing--though it still may not help much. It might be useful to also distribute .debs, but we'd need to have secure signing of some sort first.
Dave
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