How to fix it [LWN.net]

How to fix it

Posted Jul 14, 2008 20:12 UTC (Mon) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313)
In reply to: How to fix it by bronson
Parent article: Study: Attacks on package managers

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.

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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.