How to fix it [LWN.net]

How to fix it

Posted Jul 14, 2008 17:17 UTC (Mon) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861)
In reply to: How to fix it by epa
Parent article: Study: Attacks on package managers

Bittorrent should definitely be an option, but it cannot be the only one.  Far too many
corporate sites, and even some educational ones, ban or heavily restrict bittorrent (and any
other peer-to-peer protocol).

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Small change can fix it

Posted Jul 14, 2008 19:07 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Bittorrent works well for transfer of large files.. it does not work well with small packages. I would think the torrent nightmare of having a seperate torrent for each updated package would make pre-yum rpm/pre-apt .deb hell look like a picnic.

That's why you need SINGLE .torrent for ALL updates. Then you add padding and voila: you can download ANY file from peers - if there are any peers - or you can wait for a single slow seed to deliver data. Anyone can participate but only central server can issue new file to the system.

In short: yes, bittorrent needs some work to be usable as update system, but it's MUCH better then what we currently have...

Small change can fix it

Posted Jul 15, 2008 0:31 UTC (Tue) by beoba (guest, #16942) [Link]

But then, every time any package is updated in that set, you'd need to generate a new torrent
file for it to be included. Additionally, the torrent file itself would be huge, so you
wouldn't want to send it out too often.