Academic Torrents: A distributed system for sharing enormous datasets

Re:Academic Torrents: A distributed system for sharing enorm... by radarsat1 on Monday August 29, 2016 @12:42PM (#12383121)

I wish it was use more for distributing Linux package updates, a la DebTorrent.

https://wiki.debian.org/DebTorrent

This could take off it only a big player like Ubuntu pushed it. I don't see why we depend on a set of centralized servers for a bunch of files that a huge number of people download on a very regular basis.

And yet, the idea has been stagnant for years.

Edit: By which I mean, it works, but not enough people use it.

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Re:Academic Torrents: A distributed system for sharing enorm... by rakoo on Monday August 29, 2016 @02:19PM (#12383925)

It's all listed in your link, but the biggest reason is that Bittorrent was inherently built to distribute static content, and the packages is an ever-changing list. Which means that you'd have upstream servers constantly calculating new torrent files and distributing them. Moreover Bittorrent makes it real easy for an observer to know what packages you're installing, and thus what version you have.

See this alternative that uses similar idea but not real Bittorrent, they worked around the 1st problem: http://www.camrdale.org/apt-p2p/

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Re:Academic Torrents: A distributed system for sharing enorm... by radarsat1 on Monday August 29, 2016 @05:10PM (#12385363)

So not entirely stagnant ;)

I still don't see why Ubuntu/Debian/et al don't take this (or something like it) up in a more official manner. I can see why it's not a default of course, but it could be made a question during installation for example.

An additional benefit would be that you'd be able to source packages from machines on your local network, with fallback to the internet, and it would all be pretty much automatic and configuration-free.

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Re:Academic Torrents: A distributed system for sharing enorm... by ashitlerferad on Tuesday August 30, 2016 @12:33AM (#12387553)

apt-p2p and debtorrent are entirely dead. The person who created them seems to be MIA from Debian. The bootstrap nodes are dead. Both packages are orphaned. apt-p2p will not be in the next release of Debian and debtorrent was removed from the last release of Debian.

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Re:Academic Torrents: A distributed system for sharing enorm... by rakoo on Monday August 29, 2016 @05:23PM (#12385468)

I'm pretty sure the security issue (Everybody knows you have old packages) is a good point against this system, but it's true, I'd love to see this system more widespread.

For the local network part at least, it's really not that complicated to implement, all you have to do is to listen for announces on the network and ask those peers before asking remotely; there is a standard example for archlinux in pacserve (http://xyne.archlinux.ca/projects/pacserve/) with my own very crude reimplemantation (https://github.com/rakoo/paclan)

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Re:Academic Torrents: A distributed system for sharing enorm... by tombert on Monday August 29, 2016 @02:17PM (#12383915)

I totally agree; what really bothers me about current OS's is that they all depend on something centralized, so if, for example, Canonical went broke, I wouldn't be able to install new packages on my Ubuntu laptop.

I'm aware that you can swap out the PPAs as needed, but I would really like something distributed and decentralized.

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