On 14 May 2010 14:58, John Stevenson <j...@jr0cket.com> wrote: > On 14 May 2010 12:18, Samuel Toogood <sam_toog...@athsoc.org.uk> wrote: >> >> First post for a while, and I don't usually start threads, but I've been >> lurking, and I don't think this has appeared before. >> >> I recently had an idea for improving ubuntu: Wouldn't it be good if >> packages could be distributed in a peer to peer manner, as .isos can be? >> This would have several advantages, including: >> 1. If you have more than one ubuntu machine, no need to download >> everything multiple times, and no need to maintain an apt-mirror, it all >> just happens. >> 2. There are times, such as when a release first comes out, when the >> repositories get huge spikes in demand, this would help with that. >> >> The potential downside would be the threat of packages containing malware >> being propagated around, but this can be got around by checksumming etc. >> >> Like most of my ideas, it appears someone else got there first. There is a >> package in the repositories called apt-p2p which appears to be what I am >> talking about. Its homepage is at http://www.camrdale.org/apt-p2p/ . Has >> anyone used this? What do people think of the concept? Could it be >> integrated into the GUI for managing sources? >> >> Hope that makes sense. >> >> Sam > > I am happy just using a local cache or sharing my /var/cache/apt/archives > directory on my NAS box at home when there is a new release. A few symbolic > links and I only ever download a package once. > > With the large amount of mirror sites available, especially in the UK so I > dont feel the need personally to do P2P, but its an interesting idea. > > You would need to be careful about the allowed upload bandwidth, as this can > adversly affect your internet download speed
This has been discussed several times on the Debian lists - there are several prototypes or packages that do this already, some even using bittorrent, however most of the consensus is that the packages are often small and the overhead of p2p is too high to get significant gains. Certainly with so many mirrors around you might argue it is too much effort (my ISP, virgin, have a mirror on their network so I get ridiculously fast apt updates for my system) It never really took off in Debian... Anton -- Anton Piatek email: an...@piatek.co.uk blog/photos: http://www.strangeparty.com pgp: [74B1FA37] (http://www.strangeparty.com/anton.asc) fingerprint: 7401 96D3 E037 2F8F 5965 A358 4046 71FD 74B1 FA37 No trees were destroyed in the sending of this message, however, a significant number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced. -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
