On Wed, 2005-06-29 at 15:22 -0400, Konstantin Ryabitsev wrote: > On Wed, 2005-06-29 at 15:14 -0400, Bill Cox wrote: > > Integrating BitTorrent into YUM seems like a good idea to me. The > > distribution of files with BitTorrent is quite secure and robust. > > > > Instead of directly integrating BT into YUM, I'd propose creating a BT > > client/server that acts like FTP. It'd simply allow users to publish > > directory trees with the server, and clients could download from the > > directory tree in BitTorrent manner, sharing file pieces among > > themselves. > > > > I'm thinking that we could create scripts for mirroring popular RPM > > sites by having a low-bandwidth server that downloads them periodically, > > and making them available as torrents. YUM would have to be modified to > > use the FTP-like utility to download packages. > > > > So, in summary, I suspect all we really need to integrate BT and YUM is > > build an FTP-like utility based on BT for pubishing file systems and > > downloading individual files from those file systems. > > > > Should I work on such a beast? > > The bottleneck is not traffic, the bottleneck is the tracker load for a > few thousand files. This makes bittorrent inefficient for yum. I understand the need for parallel download or peer-to-peer download is not yet proven. What I need to know is: If I build it, will you use it? It turns out that peer-to-peer stuff works really well only if you have a LOT of users. So, if I build it, and no one else uses it, then it's not even useful to me. So, an answer of 'yes' or 'no' would be great, so long as it's the right answer. I guess the worse answer would be 'yes', so I go build it, and then not having anyone use it. Even if peer-to-peer download is not needed for YUM, I suspect parallel download is. Oddly enough, parallel downloading is hard, complex, but not very interesting to me. You see, it's been done before. Someone else should write it. A globally distributed, high-speed, secure, robust system of peers providing massively redundant parallel access to locally cached data from virtually every popular download site in the world sounds much more fun. Basically, I still love to hack after all these years... Thanks for the discussion. Bill
