why don't package managers use bittorrent (serious question)

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Like 27 Jun 2022 at 0:36 | Open on www.librepunk.club

4 comments

like, the thing that e.g. debian does to reduce load on the main package server is they have users pick a mirror that's geographically close to them

wouldn't it be better if you could download from all those mirrors at once and also from whatever users have the stuff you want cached

27 Jun 2022 at 0:59 | Open on www.librepunk.club

God Rattus of Vengeance

@agafnd isn't bit torrent a pretty inefficient protocol, though?

27 Jun 2022 at 1:01 | Open on eldritch.cafe

pretty fungi

@juliana perhaps! i don't really know. that could be a reason

27 Jun 2022 at 1:03 | Open on www.librepunk.club

@agafnd
ok I know nothing about this so this is a completely wild guess, but I assume bittorrent is a more complex protocol. since operating systems need to bootstrap themselves from nothing, it's probably easier to write a dependency-free http client than bittorrent?

alternative idea: maybe downloading 50+ files < 1MB each is a case where torrents perform poorly, and the overhead isn't worth it compared to http?

27 Jun 2022 at 1:09 | Open on mastodon.social

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