Patrick,It seems a good idea, but I dont think it could work in practise for a few reasons...
Firstly, the UK internet is terrible. There are bandwidth constraints on 90% of home users now, which means that we'd have to pay for more bandwidth every month due to the number of uploads... Also, the price of symmetrical DSL is not yet affordable for home users like myself, so most of us are stuck on ADSL, with upload speeds of only around 30k/s. Not to mention the appauling contention ratios of anywhere up to 100:1... I'm lucky enough to live in the countryside where there are only about 5 other users on the local exchange :)
Secondly, as you said, I can see security issues galore :(... especially for server systems which would supposedly be secure, yet a user may hypothetically be able to start downloading other files... unless of course the theoretical apt-get "uploader" limits it to one directory.
Its a nice concept, granted, but I think people are so used to mirrors now.... As that saying goes "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"... which I never abide by, because I like to tinker with things, break them then fix them again... </geek> :)
James Patrick Carlson wrote:
Hello. I'm not sure if anyone has suggested something like this ornot but I was thinking about the apt-get system and bittorrent today. What if the apt-get system was redesigned so that users could downloadupdates and upgrades from other users? This way they would trickle out to people, slowly at first, but then more and more people would have the update and thus more people could get it faster. I know there would probably be a lot of security issues involved but then maybe people wouldn't have to worry about setting up .deb mirrors and trying to get the latest upgrades. Just a thought. If it's a bad one, let me know. :) -Patrick