[Noisebridge-discuss] Is there a good way to do incrementally updated torrents?

[Sai]

Right now, Wikileaks is publishing this as a way for everyone to
mirror them: http://wikileaks.ch/file/wikileaks_archive.7z

It's an archive of 51,648 torrent files.

That's kinda absurd—frankly it'd probably crash my torrent client to
load that many separate torrents (one for every single file!).
"Morally", this ought to be a *single* torrent with a whole bunch of
files in it. The only reason not to, AFAICT (please correct me if I'm
wrong) is because one can't add new files to a torrent when new things
are released in the future.

The only ways around this I know of is
a) issuing whole new torrents for each update (which don't know about
each other and thus are likely to duplicate traffic and disk space),
or
b) issuing updates in batches, with one torrent per batch (which
logically fragments the data, but at least is consistent)

Is there a better solution?

I think one solution would be to issue new torrents that have "the
same pointers" as old torrents for the files they have in common, such
that people hosting the older versions participate fully in sharing
the subset of the new version that was in the last even if they don't
switch to the new one. But I don't know whether it's possible to do
this with the current bittorrent protocol; I suspect not.

If not, could the protocol be patched to support this? I don't know
enough about it to tell, but I'm pretty sure some of you do.

- Sai