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

[Shannon Lee]

Most bittorrent clients are capable of supporting RSS.  It's not the best
solution, as it requires a central place to serve rss from, but...

See the pirate bay for an example.


On Tue, Dec 7, 2010 at 11:46 AM, Sai <sai at saizai.com> wrote:

> 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
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-- 
Shannon Lee
(503) 539-3700

"Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science."
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