Martin Albisetti's blog

DebTorrent project, P2P apt

I've always known Linux was going to take over the world sooner or later, consequently random thoughts on scalability have randomly popped into my head.

One issue that seems pretty clear to me is the issue of having central repositories for applications and updates, which on one hand is awesome, but on the other, I can't help but wonder what would happen if a deal like the one with Dell would suddenly add, let's say, 1 million users in a very short period to the Ubuntu user base.

I'm not sure of the current state of servers/bandwidth, but my guess is that it wouldn't be such a seamless growth.
An obvious answer comes to mind, P2P, converting the issue of growth from a problem into a virtue from a resources point of view.

Well, open source is a great thing, and googling around a bit, I bumped into the DebTorrent page. It seems there's already a few projects making progress in that sense, two of them actually getting worked on sponsored by the Google Summer of Code project.

Anyway, the way things are shaping up lately, I think some real effort should be put into these approaches.

(I also blogged about this briefly in spanish)