On Thu, 2003-05-29 at 13:43, Richard Revis wrote:
> Is there a .torrent file for the Gentoo ISOs (it's not especially needed
> with the likes of mirror.ac.uk handling files, but it might reduce load
> somewhat).
>
> Equally, is it possible to grab some of the largest source archives (like
> open office) via a torrent, either manually or automatically via emerge?
> Might save some of the mirrors from being nuked whenever a new version of
> X is released :o)
This actually sounds like a pretty good idea to me.
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.
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.
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}
Maybe we could even throw some sort of if statement into make.conf to check
the value of the USE flags, and if "torrent" is found then to use the bittorrnt
fetchcommand automatically, otherwise it will just use the regular fetchcommand.
..meh.. sounds like a bit to much work(pardon the pun)
Im open for others comments though, I think its a neat idea, im just not sure
if it would work.
Alex
--
Microsoft hardly needs a SCO source license. Its license payment to SCO
is simply a good-looking way to pass along a bribe, coupled with an
announcement designed to further intimidate Linux users.
--Bruce Perens
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