BitTorrent enabled downloads & updates

[Adrian Likins]

On Wed, Jul 30, 2003 at 05:07:56PM -0400, Jeremy Portzer wrote:
> On Wed, 2003-07-30 at 00:06, seth vidal wrote:
> 
> > > 
> > > I figured this made so much sense that someone else has already thought
> > > of it and perhaps already implemented it.  Anyone know if that's the
> > > case?  If not, does that idea sound interesting to others?
> > 
> > It could be interesting but remember- bittorrent is mostly useful for
> > large files - not for trivially sized things like any single rpm.
> > 
> 
> Depends, somes RPMs are quite large -- mozilla, OpenOffice.org,
> kernel-source, etc.  But the demand wouldn't be nearly as high, I don't
> think, and BitTorrent works well when there's high demand.  Of course,
> demand is sometimes high when security errata come out...hmm.
> 

	Discussions with Bram Cohen seemed to indicate it 
probabaly wasn't workable for package updates, so the
idea never really got off the backburner.

	Newer BitTorrents look like they might have
some support for picking out small pieces of big 
archives, so maybe it could work. 

Adrian