[announce] yum: parallel downloading

[David Malcolm]

On Wed, 2012-05-16 at 12:07 -0400, Zdenek Pavlas wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> A new yum and urlgrabber packages have just hit Rawhide.  These releases
> include some new features, including parallel downloading of packages and
> metadata, and a new mirror selection code.  As we plan to include these
> features in RHEL7, I welcome any feedback or bug reports!
This may be a crazy idea, but has anyone looked at making yum's
downloader use bittorrent?

For better or worse, yum is constantly hitting the repo metadata files,
so presumably it could benefit from making that be a peer-to-peer
operation, and grabbing/sharing the packages via bittorrent could help
reduce the load on mirrors when we do a big update.

(obviously there would be concerns about firewalls, asymmetric upload
speeds, impact on our metrics, bittorrent being regarded as evil by
ISPs, etc)

Dave