tracker

[Steve Cotton]

On Sun, Apr 26, 2015 at 11:37:19AM +0100, Octavio Martins wrote:
> I'm trying debtorrent (want to see it working), but it rarely
> connect to peers, in the tracker info page there is no
> torrents, sometimes there is one or two, but it vanishes, it
> seems that there is some (agressive) cleanup going on in the
> peer lists

Hi Octavio,

Sorry, but the AFAIK the DebTorrent tracker has been down for a
couple of years.  I'm surprised that it is back up again, so
maybe there is new development.  OTOH, as you've seen the mailing
list is also quiet.

Debian's archive format has also changed slightly, IIRC the
client would need updates to usefully cache files.  This was the
cause of bug #744228.

The other thing is that Debian has a good mirror network.  For a
.deb-based project that didn't have the mirror network then I
think debtorrent would be a useful mirror, but with the mirrors
it's not really needed.

> I think it is worth to take a look at it, while there is some
> clients installed

Simply installing the client doesn't update apt's sources.list to
use the proxy.  Although the clients do fall back to downloading
directly without torrent, I think any client that's currently
running probably isn't in the torrent.

There's more detail in bugs #730459 and #744228.  But if you
compare those with the popcon graph, it looks like most
installations didn't notice the tracker being down for a long
time.

Steve