I think size is the biggest factor. OS ISOs are pretty big, so having a managed download is helpful. If the 100 GB triple-A games were open source I would certainly expect torrents. But the FOSS things I download directly are pretty small, and the vast majority are done through a package manager or docker compose. So there may be a Goldilocks zone in the middle where it’d be helpful, but in those cases I’d expect a small installer that downloads the bulk of it for you.
So not much benefit for the consumer, but what about the provider? Spreading the traffic would reduce load on the hosting server which is a positive. You’d still have to handle the bulk of the traffic until the seeders outpace the leechers, but on long enough timescales it’d be helpful. Except you can’t really update a torrent, which means each release needs to start fresh. This still works for OS creators because updates tend to be far apart, there is a large user base, and there is still some market for older versions. For regular programs you may only get one of those three, at which point adding torrents may be more hassle than it’s worth.
Most aren’t big enough to be worth the effort, either by size or userbase.
Also, it adds a whole 'nother layer of complexity. Now instead of just a Web server, you need a torrent client and all the CI/CD built up around it.
Not really though web seeding is a thing
Never heard of it. How can someone quickly integrate this into their CD process? Looks like I can build a magnet link that points to a Web seed, but I guess I’d need to submit to some public trackers?
I didn’t find a whole lot of resources on this.
Afaiu if you have a web server, you can web-seed from it, no need for trackers. Archive.org has that for every upload, although they also have a tracker of their own.
However, specifically on Archive.org there’s not much point in torrents because they download from the web seeds before seeing any other peers. Though there’s the convenience of selecting the files to download in the torrent client.
I think you still need a tracker to discover peers. So unless it’s only a Web download (which would make this whole effort stupid), peers still need to be able to find each other.
Though my understanding of BT’s P2P protocol is pretty weak so I might be running on false assumptions.
Afaiu DHT, the distributed peer tracking, works for any torrent. It’s not as quick as a tracker, but it does its thing. I download some torrents by exclusively using the DHT.
Well, this is why people don’t use BT more for their FLOSS downloads.
I’ll do some more digging just because I’m curious, but without resources to show how people can leverage this for Web downloads most are not going to make the effort for little to no benefit.
Archive.org provide web seeding, and funnily the files typically quickly download from that before even finding any other seeds, defeating the point of torrents.
Meanwhile the couple times I tried downloading Linux via torrents, the client seemed to crash itself and the system by trying to talk to the thousand peers.
Torrents have little to offer when you aren’t pirating bulky media files. And don’t track frequent release versions, code repos, or integrate with distribution packaging ecosystems.
Is there any practical reason they would offer torrent downloads?
Windows uses them by default for updates (they call it “Delivery Optimization”)
apt-p2p exists, but it’s not installed by default, so is unlikely to have enough peers to be useful
ah, so Distribution bandwith naturally matching number of users requesting.
I’m not sure if we are as bandwith constrained anymore
I could be wrong but aren’t torrents immutable. So only that particular release is valid. Should a new patch be released a new torrent will need to be disseminated.
Compared this to a http download where you can reuse the /latest/ folder for water is the most recent release.
A lot of foss projects don’t make sense as a torrent download. For instance, most of my foss projects are libraries that people who write websites use to compile and bundle the JavaScript they ship for their website. It wouldn’t make a lot of sense to distribute this via torrent, since torrents don’t have a lot of the features you would want, like checking for new versions of the software. Because the majority of foss projects wouldn’t make sense to distribute via torrent, the developers on projects that would make sense to distribute via torrent are more likely to vend it via methods that there is more infrastructure for (like a package manager), or is easier to set up and maintain (like direct downloads). I think if you were interested in changing this part of foss culture, your best bet would be to create and publish a GitHub action that would package and upload a distributable to a torrent provider.
I don’t think there’s stigma. Most users use package managers to get their software. For large operating systems, a torrent does help make downloads faster and less expensive when many people begin to seed it (and many FOSS operating systems do offer torrents), but most projects won’t benefit from that.
I personally would not want to go through the hassle of getting the magnet link, putting it in my torrent program, waiting for it to finish, verifying the signature (if there even is one) and the checksum, and only then manually extracting it so that I can use it.
For me, it’s a matter of infrastructure for regular downloads being free. I just upload the distributable into a release on Codeberg and I’m done.
Whatever is needed to provide a torrent is just additional complexity, where I’m not sure it actually benefits anyone.
Of course, if I wanted to become more independent from my code hosting platform, torrents would be something to consider. But my projects are far too unknown to get seeded, so it would still just be a direct download with additional hoops.deleted by creator
They do when it makes sense. Hosting small Giles is not a big deal, and small files would be a bad experience on torrent, since by the time you get peers to start the download you would have already finished it from a normal server, not to mention that you need to host the torrent file anyways. Also things that have lots of releases/patches are a bad experience, since people might be seeding an old version.
However, large files that only get sporadic releases, such as distros iso, can definitely benefit from it and you can usually find torrent links for them.
