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Arnaud Kyheng wrote: | Hello, | | I love the Debian project, and I have worked on a new development for | it: Apt-Torrent :)
Thank you for your contribution. However, I looked at doing something similar to this a little while ago and found that bittorrent is not very well suited for doing package downloads. Of the ~15k binary packages in Debian about 87% are under 1 meg in size and 98% are under 10 megs. The bit-torrent protocol works best on files significantly larger than this. Also, the protocol is not as efficient as it could be for the server hosting the .torrent file, which means it scales quite poorly when there are lots of requests for small files, as would be the case for Debian packages.
However, I do feel that having a p2p backend to apt is a very interesting and feasible distribution method. There is a lot of structure in the way Debian lays out its archive, from the Package files to the .deb's themselves, which can be exploited to make this very efficient. There has also been a myriad of research papers exploring overlay networks and application level multicast which could be adopted to form a package network that would provide advantages over our current mirror infrastructure. (I've actually done a little work on exploring this, but haven't gotten very far due to time constraints.)
Cheers, - -Mike -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.5 (GNU/Linux)
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