apt-{gnutella,freenet} (was: APT: Packages file to large to download everytime)

[Edward Betts <edward@debian.org>]

Hamish Moffatt <hamish@debian.org> wrote:
> > Well, on an unrelated issue, what do folks think of the idea of 
> > apt-gnutella or apt-freenet ?
> 
> What is the need?
> 
> Despite some attempts and discussion over the past few years there are
> still no major unofficial .deb repositories. I think that's a good
> thing; we don't need a deb equivalent of rpmfind.net. That is not how
> a quality distribution is made. Interesting how the whole "drop non-free"
> movement has fallen to bits too.

The mirror system could be considered to be to centralised, yes it gives us
more control, but if a mirror fails then you have to edit sources.list and
download the package file again.

Master recently went down, it is best if things are decentralised so that we
have fewer single points of failure. Yes, distributed computing is harder to
achieve, but it has its benefits.

With a well-written P2P system I do not have to hunt out the fastest mirror,
the system will do the work for me. Suddenly there is not just a handful of
Debian mirrors being run at universities and companies, but every Debian
machine becomes a mirror. Less traffic jams at big sites because packages are
shared between machines.

I'd like to see something similar with automated building. If I am running on
i386, and somebody uploads a new package to Debian in source form and maybe
sparc binaries. I tell my machine I want the package updated, so it downloads
the source, compiles it, and makes it available on the network for other i386
machines that want the same package. I know their are security problems with
this model, who's machines do you trust to build packages? I am just thinking
aloud.

-- 
Don't worry  --  shop.