Re: using torrents for packages?

[Jeremy Huiskamp <jhuiskam_(_at_)_uoguelph_(_dot_)_ca>]

On 2-May-06, at 12:21 AM, jared r r spiegel wrote:
>   a couple of things spring to mind:
>
> A) python would have to be in base then.  the license seems to my
>    amateur eyes as a BSD license with a tamed-down djb clause #3.
>    perhaps the license excludes it from consideration in base.

bittorrent is a protocol whose first implementation happened to be in  
python, nothing more...

> B) making the ports infrastructure make constructive use of
>    the bittorrent concept might be complicated.  some packages
>    are quite small; some packages are quite large.  people are
>    going to have to sit around seeding forever for some of them
>    for there to be any difference from just going FTP...

Obviously the idea of seeding makes integrating bt with the package  
tools ridiculous.  The only way to start would be to download them by  
hand (which we can all do now apparently, teh yays!) but that makes  
dependency management hellish.  I guess somebody could hack up a bt  
client that was dependency aware to use alongside the package tools.   
But the nearest mirror has always been lightning fast for me, much  
faster than I expect bt would ever be.  Out of the thousands of  
packages, how many people are really going to leave their machines  
seeding the particular ones that I want?

Jeremy