Elliott, Thanks for the feedback. The problem with a single large download file is twofold; 1) You loose the ability to have different sources for different patch sets. 2) (As you've mentioned) it's not universally supported by all BT clients. I followed the discussions relating got multi-tracker capabilities and Bram (The author of the offical client) was very anti-it, so again it's unlikley it'll be supported by all clients. I'll definatley put a note in for v2 of the paper though. Regards, AL. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Elliott Wilcoxon" <elliott@xxxxxxxxxxxx> To: "Discussions about configuration tool development" <fedora-config-list@xxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Thursday, March 18, 2004 10:50 PM Subject: Re: BitTorrent based update mechanism > Nice job, it's like you read my mind. However, I suggest that instead > of a million small .torrent files sent as part of the update summary, > one large one be sent. The large one would have the meta-info for a > completely updated system. The End User's client then just downloads > the specific updates that the user wants (several clients support > downloading selected files in a torrent, instead of the whole thing). > Unless, of course, the size of the larger .torrent is prohibitive; I'm > unaware of how .torrent filesize scales with the number of files that > the .torrent contains information for. There could be other issues with > one large torrent and/or many small torrents, something you might want > to research for v2 of the paper? > > Also, to prevent the whole thing coming down should the tracker become > unavailable, I suggest that the multi-tracker spec be used ( > http://home.elp.rr.com/tur/multitracker-spec.txt ). AFAIK, the most > recent official Bittorrent client doesn't support it, but many > unofficial open source clients support it, so I don't forsee its > inclusion as a huge problem. > > Elliott Wilcoxon > > fedora@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote: > > All, > > > > I've written a short paper on how BitTorrent could be used in an update mechanism (i.e. a method that coule be integrated into up2date). This should help those who have bandwidth problems with the amount of downloads they get(such as the Fedora Legacy project). > > > > I've put the paper online at http://www.argosytelcrest.co.uk/papers/btupdate.html and I'd appreciate any comments anyone has on the ideas. > > > > Regards, > > > > Al. > > > > > > > -- > Fedora-config-list mailing list > Fedora-config-list@xxxxxxxxxx > http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-config-list > >