Fedora bittorrent tracker?

Bill McGonigle bill at bfccomputing.com
Mon Jun 1 22:28:06 UTC 2009


On 06/01/2009 02:39 PM, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> Hmm if this works out well, this might be a useful service for
> contributors in a more general sense. Once you have the seedless
> tracker in place, it will be interesting to see if other people make
> requests to use it for other secondary content.

I've been thinking to myself, trying to do testing this round, that 
having nightly builds from rawhide of live cd's and such would be 
tremendously useful, but the traditional distribution method doesn't 
really support it.  To digress, it's really hard to be a useful tester 
without running rawhide, and running rawhide can be really hard on 
typical users.  But liveCD + liveusb-creator is pretty easy.

I've done a bit of preliminary reading of protocols and .torrent 
structure, and haven't seen anything that necessarily precludes a 
torrent that changes over time.  Whether any trackers or clients support 
this I'm not sure.  I'm writing this without having done any 
experimentation, but this thread seemed like a good opportunity to chime 
in, and maybe get some advice.

Should it prove to be possible, bittorrent may offer some unique 
advantages over traditional mirror methods.  But that's thinking too far 
ahead.

Anyway, it seems a dozen or so folks with pipes thinking a project is a 
good idea (and thus willing to seed) is enough to bootstrap 
distribution.  And having a coordinated central tracker is a great idea 
so users can know what's real and what's not.  There might be some ideas 
to be learned from git too - I dunno, I'm mostly thinking out loud.

-Bill

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