[clug] .au Debian mirrors

[Jepri]

Matthew Hawkins wrote:

>Alex Satrapa said:
>  
>
>>Though I'm a little puzzled as to what advantage there would be in
>>downloading from a "free" peer over downloading from a "free" mirror.
>>Surely the download-from-peer option would be slower and more
>>troublesome than an ISP-maintained mirror?  Even if you go the
>>BitTorrent route, the traffic's all got to go through the ISP anyway.
>>    
>>
>
>Lets pretend for a moment that this ISP is still living in the last
>millennium and doesn't have a local Debian mirror...
>
>Does it make sense now?
>
>I was thinking recently (yeah yeah, laugh it up), it shouldn't be too much
>trouble to add a torrent method to apt.
>
>  
>
This gets discussed on the debian lists every now and again.  The 
response seems to be one part fossilized attitudes, one part NIH, one 
part security concerns and one part practical "it works the way it is, 
who needs P2P".

Plus, most Debian developers can calculate the bandwidth overheads of 
maintaining a connection to a P2P network for something they don't use 
more than a few minutes a day.

Being able to easily set up ad-hoc servers to share your cache might be 
a more practical solution.  But how will we find these server?  Perhaps 
a peer-to-peer network might help :)