Jesse Keating wrote:
Most torrent clients I've seen today allow you to pick and choose which files you wish to download. As such, does it make sense to collapse the DVD and CD torrents into a single torrent and allow people to use the client to pick which they want? Are there pros/cons to this?
We should Do The Right Thing By Default. Thus, there needs to be a standalone torrent that has just the DVD ISO (and maybe the netinst ISO) for all those newcomers who don't know any better, so we don't scare them off with a 9 GB torrent.
In theory, we could have a "menu" torrent to let you download the x86_64 DVD, the PPC CDs, and the i686 Live image all in the same place, but this would give us a sparse and somewhat disjoint set of peers in a torrent that's much smaller than the main single-purpose torrents, defeating the purpose of using bittorrent.
Another problem is prioritization. Right now, if I'm downloading three DVD ISOs and two liveCD images (not entirely unlikely) I can tell my torrent client that I really want the i686 liveCD first, and I will get it inside the hour, and I can play around for a bit while I'm waiting for the rest to complete. If they're all in a single torrent, I'm stuck sitting on my thumbs for a day while it randomly pulls chunks that are mostly from other ISOs.
Since bittorrent doesn't have a concept of dependencies (no "metatorrents") there's no benefit to having multiple files in a torrent unless all of them are useless without the others.
-- Chris -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
