Re: [gentoo-dev] portage + bittorrent anyone?

[Stroller]

On Feb 16, 2004, at 5:35 am, Lisa Seelye wrote:

> On Mon, 2004-02-16 at 00:32, Jason Toffaletti wrote:
>> Is there any interest in adding bittorrent support to portage. This
>> would give
>> users the option of using bittorrent to download distfiles. It would
>> take
>> some load off of rsync mirrors. Some work might need to be done to add
>> features to bittorrent to allow users to share their local distfile
>> cache,
>> but its already written in python, which is a plus.
>
> You can write something and use the FETCH_COMMAND in make.conf.
>
> Personally I don't want to wait a zillion hours to download a simple
> source file.

My experience with BitTorrent is that it will saturate the download of 
my 512/256 ADSL connection for any reasonably well-seeded file. If you 
do not experience good download speeds with BitTorrent, it is IMO 
likely that your firewall or NAT is blocking the necessary ports.

BitTorrent can be extremely quirky about ports - if your ports are 
blocked then on one day you may still get very high download speeds 
(because there is a peer available with have those ports open who has 
large parts of the file you require) and the next day you may get 
absolutely abysmal download speeds (because most NAT users don't know 
about port-forwarding) even though a tracker might show the file as 
well-seeded. I hope my explanation at 
<http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.user/47669> is clear & 
more detailed.

I would, however, suggest the OP has a search of the archives. This has 
been suggested before, and from what I can find there are neither any 
objections to integrating p2p support into Portage, nor many volunteers 
to do so. I seem to recall that someone was working on it at one stage, 
but I can't find any references to that when I search.

Stroller.


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