Small change can fix it

Small change can fix it

Posted Jul 14, 2008 19:07 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: How to fix it by madscientist
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.

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...

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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.