Re: Mirror list
On Sat, Oct 29, 2005 at 06:10:21PM -0700, mike wrote:
> it might be off topic for this list, but i think it may be
> advantageous to think about using some sort of p2p type mechanism in
> the future.
>
> imagine an infinite supply of "mirrors" to grab the files from,
> instead of centrally-hosted sites with what seems to be regular
> turnover.
>
> obviously would still need to have some sort of central servers with
> the ports/packages list to verify the md5sum's of the files to ensure
> integrity... could leverage existing protocols like bittorrent too.
Someone suggested that in the past. As far as I recall here are some of
the problems that were pointed out:
You would need a .torrent per deb file
Many files are small while bittorrent is best for larger files that can
be divided into blocks for parallel transfers.
Someone has to generate all these torrent files and then you have to
mirror those around so apt-get can get the torrent to then connect to a
tracker to then start downloading the deb. Often for smaller deb files
the actual download from http would have been faster.
bittorrent makes sense for cd images (although even there the jigdo
system makes more sense since you can update a 3.1r0 cd image to a 3.1r1
cd image by only downloading the actual changes, while bittorrent would
find most of the image had changed and do nothing useful with the old
data).
Besides the current set of mirrors seem pretty good to me. I often get
560KB/s on my 5Mbit link from the mirror I use. http works great for my
needs.
Len Sorensen
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