[ros-general] Torrents for ReactOS build environment

[João Jerónimo]

Hello,

At Sun, 10 May 2020 19:36:39 +0200 Colin Finck wrote:
> While I like people who take the initiative, I haven't seen torrents
> widely used for open source software distribution for at least a decade.

Not true. Debian project regularly distributes it's ISOs using 
torrents/magnet, and the same is true for LinuxMint, LibreOffice, 
FreeBSD, Fedora, etc.

Many of these projects have their own private trackers setup. And you 
can see their stats:

http://bttracker.debian.org:6969/stat

As you can see, debian-10.0.0-amd64-DVD-1.iso was downloaded 27894 using 
the torrent network.

https://torrent.fedoraproject.org/stats/current-stats.json

https://wiki.freebsd.org/Torrents

http://openbsd.somedomain.net/

> Whenever I encounter a slow download these days, I can always choose an
> alternative mirror that is faster.

Well, they are not always available and as far as I know the torrents 
tend to be more distributed and allow download "acceleration" by design 
(I mean downloading several file pieces at the same time) whereas with a 
simple HTTPS mirror you remain dependent of the bandwidth of 1 server.

In Debian website they even provide an explanation about why one should 
use the torrents: «It puts minimal load on our servers because 
BitTorrent clients upload pieces of files to others while downloading, 
thus spreading the load across the network and making blazing fast 
downloads possible».

Regards.

JJ