Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: BitTorrent

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Thu, Jan 22, 2004 at 08:17:20AM +0100, Peter Simons wrote:
> graydon hoare writes:
> 
>  > I think work best in the situation of many
>  > readers/traders of one big data blob
> 
> That's what I was thinking about, regarding the recent
> discussion of giga-byte-sized repositories. I think, BT can
> transfer whole directories as one "entity", so if monotone
> could export patches in way that each patch is stored in a
> file associated to its SHA1 hash, then this all would
> probably. This system would scale very well with large
> patches. It would make monotone as distributed as it can
> possibly get -- the killer application for SourceForge.

Even for SF, I'm not sure this would actually help that much in
practice.  BitTorrent is only useful if lots of people want the same
data; SF's problem is that it has so many projects that the few people
who are interested in each are still enough to drive it to its knees.
I guess there might be some projects that have enough load for this to
be worthwhile, but I'm not sure...

Of course, using BitTorrent for releases, or for initial checkouts
("I want the 2 gigabyte complete history of gcc, please"), probably
makes more sense.

-- Nathaniel

-- 
"...All of this suggests that if we wished to find a modern-day model
for British and American speech of the late eighteenth century, we could
probably do no better than Yosemite Sam."