Re: trouble with up2date

On Mon, 2003-11-17 at 17:57, Andy Green wrote:
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> On Monday 17 November 2003 16:14, Dave Roberts wrote:
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> > I was actually thinking about just this same thing the other day. What
> > if we crossed yum with bittorrent?
> 
> A really neat way to do this would be to make a new <protocol>:// thing, 
> however that works, for example bittorrent://server/path/to/.torrent, which 
> fetches the .torrent 'metadata' file over http as usual, using the given 
> path, but then 'dereferences' the .torrent into the payload file using 
> bittorrent, in one step.  The result of the bittorrent:// thing is the 
> payload file as far as the program can tell.  With this method no changes 
> would be needed to yum or other things, its just a new protocol like ftp:// 
> or http://.

I like the idea, but I can see some flaws in it:

- You presume that any torrent file must be accessible via http protocol
which is wrong IMO -- but this could be done with something like
bittorrent://http://server/path/to/.torrent instead, where http could be
exchanged for any protocol capable of retrieving files.
- To work properly, BitTorrent relies on the assumption that downloaders
are uploaders as well. For your scheme everyone would have to download
and store all packages of a repository on disk. Or even worse, you would
have to have one torrent for each package which could only be described
as an "ugly mess".

Nils
-- 
     Nils Philippsen    /    Red Hat    /    [email protected]
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
 safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."     -- B. Franklin, 1759
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