P2P Package Manager

[Kyle Sexton]

"Billy Crook" <billycrook at gmail.com> writes:

> Has anyone ever heard of a package manager that 'scans' other machines within its subnet or within specified subnets
> for updates before using the official repositories?  There would either have to be some service advertisement protocol
> lime MDNS or each machine would literally have to scan for a designated port number listening for these requests on all
> machines.  Once they locate each other, the idea would be ome machine downloads 500MB of updates from the repo, and
> from there on, every other machine (with the same distro and arch) just pulls from the faster local machine, rather
> than using up inet bandwidth.
>
> Any suggestions (Other than a dedicated local repository mirror)?
>

I haven't heard of anything like this before, but a problem I see is
that you'd have to authenticate which of the servers are allowed to
contain updates.  Otherwise someone could put a box up w/ rouge packages
and get them pushed out (granted package signing probably solves this a
little).

Can I ask what the advantage of this as opposed to a local repository
is?

-- 
Kyle Sexton