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

[Cameron Dale]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Cameron Dale <camrdale at gmail.com>
Date: Apr 11, 2007 8:40 PM
Subject: Re: BitTorrent Protocol Expansion (Google SoC)
To: Anthony Towns <aj at azure.humbug.org.au>


On 4/10/07, Cameron Dale <camrdale at gmail.com> wrote:
> Anthony Towns wrote:
> > On Tue, Apr 10, 2007 at 12:16:26AM -0700, Cameron Dale wrote:
> >> I haven't tried the sorting by popularity (hard), or by dependencies
> >> (harder) yet, so they might be better. If you have any other ideas for
> >> statistics you'd like to see related to this, let me know.
> >
> > Can't you just grab the data from http://popcon.debian.org/by_vote for
> > sorting by popularity?
>
> I could, I would just have to find a way to import it and I haven't
> gotten around to it yet (I shouldn't have said "hard", just "work" ;) ).
> I'll try tonight.

I did this, and the results are better than the other strategies if
you use inst (not vote). The numbers are still too large to consider
though. I also redid it using my i386 server's configuration (fewer
packages, only 938, size was about 400MB), and the wasted download
doubled in size (now over 20% for 256 KB pieces). So there is strong
dependence on the configuration (probably due to its size), and not in
a good way. If you have a configuration you'd like me to try out let
me know, but I think it's a moot point as this scheme seems
unworkable. Back to variable sized pieces!

I see the project was accepted, which is great! Thanks again.

I think the 2nd step is to get an Alioth project, partly so these
emails can go somewhere useful (rather than into the ether ;) ). But
that requires the 1st step, which is choosing a permanent name. I'm
not that crazy about AptBittorrent, and there are certainly lots of
others to consider:

apt-bittorrent
apt-torrent (probably not a good idea, due to this: http://sianka.free.fr/)
deb-torrent
apt-peer
apt-p2p
p2p-proxy
proxy-torrent
apt-bt
bt-mirror (last year's)

The list goes on. Basically, any combination of apt, bittorrent,
proxy, mirror, p2p, archive, etc...

I don't really like p2p, as many associate it with stealing. I like
the affiliation with apt, as it is intended to work primarily (only?)
with it. I kind of like debtorrent, but I'm not sure why, I think
because I envision distributing .dtorrent files, which I'm not sure
we'll ever do.

Wow, I have made a mess of this (I suck at these kinds of easy
decisions). Do you have any preference here? Maybe sticking with
apt-bittorrent is the best? Or maybe we should break with the
BitTorrent name completely and go with apt-pieces or some such thing.

Cameron