This is because the HTTP protocol is so much overhead that most trackers don't even really run it anymore. I think UDP being promoted to the spec would've been a step in the right direction. Modern trackers have a bunch of tricks like BEP34[0] to avoid getting pounded that would be great if every client conformed to.
I hope I'm not coming off as aggressive. I really appreciate this work and I'm really glad to see a spec revision. It's just as you said, there's been many years and many good improvements that I'd like to see made while there's still a change to break things.
HTTP trackers are considered fine for medium-scale torrent deployments. UDP trackers were originally introduced to cope with the traffic caused by running an open tracker that manages 100k+ infohashes for the whole world.
Also, both BEP3 and 52 already forward-reference the tracker extensions (compact and UDP), so someone who writes a new bittorrent implementation should already be aware of them.
Maybe we could make it more clear that some BEPs are almost-mandatory.
Yeah, if I remember correctly bittorrent DHT ultimately just maps 20 byte hashes to peer-lists (IP + port pairs). It's obviously designed to be convenient for bittorrent swarm discovery, but nothing about it limits it to bittorrent usage. Indeed, I'm surprised it's not more widely exploited for p2p bootstrapping.
Did you guys talk with the IPFS team? Do both of you have a desire to start bringing both families of protocols and technologies closer together?
I feel in this age we must make de-fragmentation of efforts our topmost priority.
In particular, I note that there's nothing in there regarding which infohash should be used in the tracker updates. Should traffic with v1/v2 clients be reported separately, or should it be consolidated under the v2 infohash?
> I feel like trackers were largely overlooked in this update, but I'm biased because I work on a popular tracker.
Yes, we did not pay much attention to trackers, but BEP52 basically seized the opportunity to do some incompatible changes we always wanted to do anyway (quite a few accumulated over the years), and there were no such open issues with the http tracker protocol.