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Comment by zenoprax | Hacker News Reader

Every change to the source is effectively a new torrent. This creates a ton of fragmentation as data is reorganized, remixed, reencoded, and so on.

You can see this with many Linux distros: there is no single Debian torrent that people seed for years because there's always a refreshed version.

Distros are a bad use case for P2P anyway since you depend on upstream as soon as you start upgrading and installing packages.

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IPFS has a solution [0] to this problem

[0] https://specs.ipfs.tech/ipns/ipns-record/

Most of IPFS doesn't actually work very well, if you've ever tried to use it

> if you've ever tried to use it

Heh, you got me :) IPFS is one of those things that I love reading and about and thinking about using someday, but somehow never get around to it.

The problems begin with taking 5-10 minutes to locate a file on the network. That's right, when you ask for a file it takes 5-10 minutes. Also if the file isn't in the network at all then it never terminates.

Nobody noticed because everyone just used the central web gateway that cached every file anyone ever accessed.

> Distros are a bad use case for P2P anyway since you depend on upstream as soon as you start upgrading and installing packages.

This is true for any distribution method not just p2p. You can even download a nightly through torrents so what does it matter how the data is transferred if it’s always going to require `apt update`?

Yeah, I just use the "netinstaller" ISOs since it's much smaller and never needs to be updated. If I had a need for air-gapped/offline installs I'd either download a larger ISO or just manually install packages from .deb as needed.

You can trivially have storage deduplication for the files served via torrent, transparent to the protocol. The most trivial version of this that you can do today with pretty much any client is having a single directory containing files serving multiple overlapping torrents.

> files serving multiple overlapping torrents

This sounds wildly complex, especially from a discovery perspective.

I don't see why it would be. It's transparent to other clients just like it is to the protocol. It cannot be more complex than alternatives by construction.

Or use a filesystem with dedupe like ZFS.

but model releases are already non-changeable?

Yes, models are a good use for P2P especially if everyone agrees to share the same torrent and someone (or a cohort) commit to seeding for the long haul.

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