How to fix it [LWN.net]

How to fix it

Posted Jul 14, 2008 17:40 UTC (Mon) by smoogen (subscriber, #97)
In reply to: How to fix it by epa
Parent article: Study: Attacks on package managers

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.

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How to fix it

Posted Jul 14, 2008 19:22 UTC (Mon) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

There's no need to have a separate torrent per package.  Just use a single torrent with all
packages.  Any decent bittorrent client will allow you to download just the files that you
want and ignore everything else.

Of course, you will have to create a new torrent any time a package changes.  That might be a
show-stopper.  :)

How to fix it

Posted Jul 14, 2008 20:12 UTC (Mon) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

but people don't pull all the packages (pulling all debian packages is several hundred gigs)
so a single torrent of everything won't work.

now it would be very possible to make a new torrent-like protocol that pulls individual
packages as needed per a torrent, but none of the package managers can do that today.

Not a new protocol, but a slight modification of the existing one

Posted Jul 14, 2008 20:40 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Most torrent managers I know about can download just a few files from huge torrent. Sure it works not as good as when you download the whole torrent but when there are thousands of peers it still works great. You only need to pad .torrent with zero-filled files and voila - no need for a new protocol.

How to fix it

Posted Jul 16, 2008 17:48 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

You might have missed this line in my post?

> Any decent bittorrent client will allow you to download just the files that you want and
ignore everything else.

Bittorrent and small files

Posted Jul 15, 2008 9:38 UTC (Tue) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]

What makes you say that Bittorrent does not work well with small files?

Bittorrent and small files

Posted Jul 15, 2008 18:45 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Say rather that it doesn't work well with small transfers. My impression 
is that it has very slow start, so for transfers taking less than a few 
minutes, ordinary FTP is going to be noticeably faster.