I disagree that metalinks are "better" than torrents. Metalinks may be standardized but bittorrent clients do not care about them and most people don't have a program that can download metalinks (at least in 2011), whereas almost everyone (in my experience) has a bittorrent client. The good news is that the .torrent file format already supports "web seeds" (since a few years ago) which as the name suggests allow you to put an HTTP URI inside the .torrent file as a web-based seed which a torrent client can fall back to when there are no other seeds on the torrent. We should offer .torrent files with our HTTP download locations listed in the .torrent file as web seeds. Metalink files should be an alternative for those who actually have a metalink client. I know that I for one was pretty surprised to find metalinks but no torrents on sagemath.org when I first downloaded Sage. I ended up just downloading by HTTP since I couldn't be bothered to install aria2.
There are also other ways that you can more intelligently do automated seeding of torrents, by the way; you could just run a daemon on boxen.math.washington.edu which connects to our torrents' swarms and throttles uploading if there are enough other seeds around. This will mitigate the possibility of the whole torrent just turning upon boxen and downloading from it, which offers us no bandwidth savings over just the HTTP downloads (though this is unlikely to happen anyway when using the .torrent file "web seed" field instead of installing a bittorrent client on boxen, assuming users' bittorrent clients are well-designed). -Keshav ---- Join us in #sagemath on irc.freenode.net ! -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
