[Debtorrent-devel] Fwd: BitTorrent Protocol Expansion (Google SoC)

[Cameron Dale]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Anthony Towns <aj at azure.humbug.org.au>
Date: Mar 25, 2007 8:47 PM
Subject: Re: BitTorrent Protocol Expansion (Google SoC)
To: Cameron Dale <camrdale at gmail.com>
Cc: ajt at debian.org


On Mon, Mar 19, 2007 at 07:46:07AM -0700, Cameron Dale wrote:
> I haven't received a response from you regarding the email below I sent
> about your Google Summer of Code proposal from last year.

Sorry about that; it's been a bit of a rough week, and you managed to
pick the email address that gets filtered off to a different mbox that
I don't read regularly. :-/

> Sent by Cameron Dale on Mar. 10, 2007:
> > I am currently planning on applying for the Google Summer of Code, and I came
> > across your proposal (I think it was yours, anyway) for an expanded BitTorrent
> > protocol to work with the Debian archive.

So this was picked up by Matthew Wronka last year, who unfortunately
got caught up in other things, then lost net access over the summer, and
didn't get very fair. We had a brief exchange of emails at the beginning,
and he eventually emailed some code through which I never got around to
actually publishing. Anyway, I've forwarded some of the mails from that
discussion alongside this mail.

> > However, I was hoping you could expand a bit on what you hope the project to
> > achieve, and how it would be used by Debian. In particular, though you mention
> > modifications and reimplementation of the protocol, it seems like what you
> > desire could be achieved through server- and client-side wrappers around
> > traditional BitTorrent clients (though perhaps what I have in mind is simpler
> > than what you want).

The main problem is you don't want to have a .torrent file per se, and
ideally want to have variable size pieces so that they match up with
the actual packages you're downloading. The latter lets you construct
your .torrent info (piece sizes and checksums) from the Packages file
that you need to download anyway, which is a win.

Likewise, you need to cope with sharing pieces between "torrents", so
that if you have a "torrent" representing unstable/main/i386 in Monday,
and you download the pieces for the .debs you're using, you can reuse that
data to participate in the "torrent" for unstable/main/i386 on Tuesday.

Basically, the hope would be that you can setup an archive mirror
network (rather than just a cd image mirror network) that runs itself
via bittorrent.

> > Anyway, with more information I could hopefully help the
> > proposal to be accepted, and then apply to work on it.

Hope that helps.

> > http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~camerond/personal/PlanetLab.html

Unfortunately the maths there's a bit beyond me for a quick perusal,
so I'm not getting what that's actually saying. :)

Anyway, hopefully the above is of some use, though I know the deadline's
pretty soon. Good luck with your enigmail proposal either way :)

Cheers,
aj


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