[MacPorts] #17064: add BitTorrent as alternative for downloading ports

[MacPorts]

#17064: add BitTorrent as alternative for downloading ports
------------------------------------+---------------------------------------
 Reporter:  hotfusionman@…          |       Owner:  macports-tickets@…                   
     Type:  enhancement             |      Status:  new                                  
 Priority:  Low                     |   Milestone:  MacPorts base enhancements           
Component:  base                    |     Version:  1.6.0                                
 Keywords:                          |        Port:                                       
------------------------------------+---------------------------------------
Changes (by ryandesign@…):

 * cc: ryandesign@… (added)


Comment:

 I would be surprised if there were many ports offering bittorrent as a
 download option, and there probably aren't any that require it. So I can't
 see a great need to add this to MacPorts.

 Also, the way a torrent works is that it downloads from many peers, and
 you're supposed to be a good netizen and "seed" (upload to others) the
 torrent after you're done downloading it, to "pay back" the bandwidth you
 used to download it. But MacPorts can't accommodate that in its current
 implementation, since there is no persistent MacPorts process that sticks
 around. MacPorts would either have to grow a persistent process, which
 sounds like a major change, or else MacPorts would be a bad netizen when
 downloading torrents, which I don't think we want to be. Or MacPorts could
 continue to seed the torrent while it works on installing the software,
 but that would require other major changes to allow the seeding and the
 installing to happen concurrently.

 We do already have a fix in MacPorts trunk for slow distfile download
 servers: we now have our own distfiles mirror hosted by Apple which is
 usually faster, and MacPorts trunk tries download servers in order of
 performance, rather than ain the order listed in the Portfile which is
 what 1.6.0 does.

 You can already use the distfiles mirror with MacPorts 1.6.0 by following
 [wiki:ProblemHotlist#Fetchfailures these instructions] (and it will be
 used automatically as of MacPorts 1.7.0).

-- 
Ticket URL: <http://trac.macports.org/ticket/17064#comment:1>
MacPorts <http://www.macports.org/>
Ports system for Mac OS