[Debian on the Grid]

[Paul Andreassen <p@andreassen.com.au>]

Hi All,

I've been dreaming about an optimally compiled version of Debian for my
Pentium 4 since installing Gentoo.  I know there would be little
difference for almost all applications but some like Mozilla could do
with a boost.

Then I thought about compiling up my own version using a spare machine
and putting it on the web.  But the cost of the Internet access at a
decent pace would be too much.

Bittorrent seems a way around this problem, although I'm not sure how it
would handle lots of small files.  This is when it occurred to me that
if I could get people to share the upload cost, then maybe they could
also share the compiling cost.  In Internet speak this is a Grid.

The simplest way to do this would seem to me to be to have a background
application on each machine.  It would serve compiled packages on demand
and compile packages when unavailable for local use.  There could be a
Grid network for each of Stable, Testing and Unstable.

Well what do you think?
Paul