Torrents for old packages.

Xyne · 2008-12-08 11:47:13

One of the recurring wishes on the forum is for repos containing older packages. As most of those packages probably exist buried in several users' caches, I was wondering if it would be feasible to organize torrents for them.

I think security would be the biggest obstacle here, but perhaps the seemingly upcoming package signing will eliminate any worries there. Ideally the tracker would be hosted on the main server, but I realize that it would probably be unwanted extra work for the server admins and that there would be concerns over how to regulate the torrents to ensure that only (legitimate) packages were being shared.

To be honest, I'm also somewhat indifferent to this issue as I haven't had any need for it myself. My intention in posting this is to open a discussion to see what others think and perhaps find some way of making older packages more widely accessible.

peets · 2008-12-08 12:19:09

That's a lot of torrents!
An already-existing general-use public tracker could be used.
We'd need a script to make .torrents from .pkgs... s/pkg$/torrent/ and fill in boilerplate torrent info (I have no idea how those work)?

This sounds good, but it should be a non-official project, so as to not put any extra burden on the dev team. Pick a tracker and a naming convention and the rest is up to the users.

Daenyth · 2008-12-08 13:54:50

It would be pretty trivial to make a wrapper around mktorrent at least.

jgb · 2008-12-10 16:27:37

Hi,

Toward the end of the post I just finished in the pacman forum, I get into discussing a closely related topic:
http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=60653

Basically, it seems like what is needed, is version control for packages. I don't at this point feel confident in making any concrete proposals on tackling that, but I do know there are existing version control systems. And, your bringing bittorrent into the mix, reminded me of something I had recently seen:

http://code.google.com/p/gittorrent/

Were you thinking of including dependency resolution into the mix, in any way?

jgb

Hrod beraht · 2008-12-10 16:46:49

The schlunix.org mirror has older outdated packages.

Bob

Xyne · 2008-12-11 09:24:45

I wasn't really thinking beyond "hmmm, maybe torrents would work". Dependency resolution would probably be handled mostly through pacman and through manual intervention from the user. In some cases newer version of packages will satisfy the dependencies of older ones while in other cases the user will need to figure out that he needs version x and not the current version y. Perhaps some update log would be necessary to determine which dependency versions were concurrent with the target package. I don't know if there is such a log somewhere but implementing it shouldn't be very difficult.

lldmer · 2008-12-11 23:57:24

Sinds a couple of days I've my abs tree setup in git, which is automatically updated daily. This way I can check how the tree looked like on a certain moment, and provided the original sources are still available, I can rebuild the package.

I have no idea how long most sources stay available though...

Edit: If people like the idea I could see if I could make the repository public (a la cgit for example).

Last edited by lldmer (2008-12-12 02:32:41)

Arch Linux

#1 2008-12-08 11:47:13

Torrents for old packages.

#2 2008-12-08 12:19:09

Re: Torrents for old packages.

#3 2008-12-08 13:54:50

Re: Torrents for old packages.

#4 2008-12-10 16:27:37

Re: Torrents for old packages.

#5 2008-12-10 16:46:49

Re: Torrents for old packages.

#6 2008-12-11 09:24:45

Re: Torrents for old packages.

#7 2008-12-11 23:57:24

Re: Torrents for old packages.

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