Jigdo - A Professional Letter to Mike McGrath

[Chuck Anderson]

On Fri, Dec 07, 2007 at 08:48:10AM -0600, Mike McGrath wrote:
> My concern with jigdo is with how many people use it?  It seems silly to 
> host both torrent and jigdo (as much of this letter points out the 
> benefits of switching to jigdo, those benefits disappear if we simply 
> add jigdo to the mix.  Most people already have bittorrent.  Lets say we 
> were going to give Jigdo a trial run for Fedora 9 and we were going to 
> judge jigdo a success if a certain % (compared to bittorrent) use 
> jigdo.  What % would that be?

Some people CAN'T use bittorrent because of firewalls.  There should 
be no reason at all why anyone couldn't use Jigdo, because it uses 
standard FTP or HTTP to download the slices.  There are clients 
available for all the important OSes.

Jigdo and Bittorrent are really two different beasts that do different 
things to benefit different use cases.  Bittorrent is best for getting 
all the bits for an ISO set when you have nothing currently.  Jigdo is 
good for getting bits that are packed differently but are otherwise 
identical to the bits you have already, plus it can also get all the 
bits via separate and possibly distributed downloads.  So Jigdo in 
this sense has a superset of the functionality of Bittorrent.

I think we need to have some overlap by providing both services, 
certainly at least for a transition period, but perhaps even long 
term.  The real benefit to Jigdo is that you can distribute one set of 
files that represent the Everthing universe of content via HTTP/FTP 
(or ISOs via Bittorrent), and then a bunch of Jigdo templates for all 
the various spins.