Elsewhere in Dreams

Ubuntu pushes a lot of updates. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, except that it uses a lot of bandwidth, and has a single point of failure.

If I’m right, service providers are going to be moving to a per gigabyte approach in selling bandwidth in the next few year (if they haven’t already in places like Australia) at which point bandwidth use might become highly relevant.

In the meantime, we still have updates being pushed from the Ubuntu main servers (generally) unless you specify otherwise. This single point of failure (not to mention bandwidth costs for Canonical) seems a little bit behind the times. Everyone uses P2P apps like Deluge to download files; why should Apt not do the same?

I think what we need is a future-looking new Apt delivery system, but also a future-looking .deb format. Imagine if you could (just for instance; I have no idea if this is feasible or not) download a binary diff and patch your updates on to the existing binaries instead of downloading the entire binary and replacing it. And that’s just what my little brain could come up with.

Imagine also that apt-torrent (or whatever it’s called) is enabled by default and across the internet there are thousands and even millions of seed for every given update over a given period of time. That would be pretty neat, I think.

Tags: apt, bittorrent, deb, Ubuntu

Tags: apt, bittorrent, deb, Ubuntu

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 20th, 2008 at 8:32 am and is filed under main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.