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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

How many thousands of times per day are copies of software downloaded over transoceanic links when many hundreds of copies of that same data exist already in the user’s own county or even building?

These efficiency gains are real; major distributions should adopt this ASAP.

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Does IPFS actually take the peer's actual geographic location when picking one? I thought they just search for peers in the local LAN and if they don't find one, they just go for the one that's closest to them according to their PeerId (Kademlia DHT)

Well, I think it would be neat if package managers would utilize it. From my experience, it's rare that a company creates their own mirror (repo)... Especially if they're workstations.

Most package managers should maintain a local cache of packages (pacman and apt do this).

An IPFS mirror would also mean you'd have to run an IPFS node in a possibly corporate environment, which is a big nono if management doesn't allow P2P applications for whatever reasons. (Maybe they have their secret cure to cancer on their super secret server and don't want it to use the chatty IPFS protocols)

But by downloading the distro I am not applying to be a distributor of that distro.

Then you're welcome to buy a copy I guess? I mean bandwidth isn't free and the assumption is if you download a distro, you like it enough to pass a little something on to your peers or spare a dime to the distributors.

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