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Comment by ducktective | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know why BitTorrent-based Linux package managers has not become a thing?

Most linux distributions have a rather robust mirroring operation. This is much faster than bittorrent. Lots of cloud vendors provide a mirror endpoint for traffic within their network, and ISPs typically also have them.

The network is fast enough for lots of small files to not really justify it.

Though with webseeds it shouldn't matter that much, not to add redundancy with BT.

I think that hundreds of thousands of peer machines would be way faster than a few centralized repositories... right?

It seems you would have essentially unlimited bandwidth.

Finding peers is somewhat slow. When downloading via torrent it takes a while to really ramp up in speed. With a centralized repository you can start downloading basically right away. For many small files the latency is more important than the bandwidth, given that most repositories are not short on bandwitdth.

That seems easy to work around. You could write it in such a way that it would have a live cache of peers ready to go plus also the centralized peers would always be available.

I personally suspect that having centralized repos is a legacy technology from pre-torrent days when also disk wasnt cheap.

Picking a peer you have good bandwidth to is a hard problem.

They could scale back their mirroring operation to only a few servers that act as Webseeds? Then you get the best of both worlds.

http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0019.html

> The network is fast enough for lots of small files to not really justify it.

Not really true. Try the following: ssh into the host doing the mirroring, with socks proxy. Now socksify apt through the connection.

The speed difference is amazing. Despite double encrypting.

<https://wiki.debian.org/DebTorrent>

Bittorrent is most useful as a long-running application or background service to make data available. To get any use out of it in short-running contexts (e.g. updaters) you need lots of machines jumping on the content simultanously.

I wonder if you could insert your own downloader to pacman / whatever without touching the source.. I might try to do this at some point if I have time. I often get over 100MBps from torrents but only like 5MBps from package repositories (though on good days that might be up to 40MBps)

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