Please ignore this mail if you havent not have problems hosting or downloading mods *ever*.
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Distributing mods is a pain. Sould be big files, 100 MB, 200 MB, 400 MB. And bandwitdh is expensive. Its a pain for hosters (planet* and clones), Its a pain for users. Valve provide with a solution for is own mods, Steam, but the problem is still open for half-life and battlefield community
To solve a similar problem, the nice debian community is designing a tool that support upgrading, fetching from N servers,etc.. and merging everything has a iso or uncompresed zip file. In a trasparent way!.
ISO images distribution: http://atterer.net/jigdo/
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The large image does not need to be stored on the server, instead only the many small files contained in the image. This works with CD images, DVD images (both ISO9660 and UDF format), uncompressed zip files, tar archives... jigdo-file is format independent.
In spite of the above, jigdo creates a bit-exact copy of the original image on the user's machine. (To achieve this, the directory data, boot block etc. of the image is stored in a special .template file which is distributed alongside the .jigdo file.)
There is full control over where jigdo-lite will download the individual parts. It is possible to define mirrors so users can choose their nearest mirror.
jigdo relies on standard HTTP/FTP, no support for special protocols like rsync, and no installation of special software is required on the mirrors.
jigdo-lite supports resuming aborted downloads, or continuing the download with another mirror if the current one proves slow.
It is possible to "upgrade" a CD image: If a new version of an image is released, jigdo-lite can download only the data that has changed, the remaining data is read from the outdated version.
It is possible to release modified versions: If someone distributes a CD image and you have made a few small modifications, e.g. added some files, then you only need to upload the data for your modifications to your webspace. All the data from the original CD image is still fetched from the original site.
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Looking forward to this tool. Maybe this can save the pain of downloading huge update files from somewhere, and will able modders to span is mod around tiny hosters or whatever this interesting approach to distributed hosting can able.
:/
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