jigdo

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Sun, 2008-04-27 at 18:37 +0800, John Summerfield wrote:
> John Poelstra wrote:
> > Adam Pribyl said the following on 04/25/2008 01:25 PM Pacific Time:
> >> I appreciate the effort put into preparing jigdo and templates for F9, 
> >> however I'm bit strugglig what is the purpose of this method. It's 
> >> maybe great for server side distribution, but it's bit useless without 
> >> users using it right? As of now, there is no description how to use 
> >> those cryptic .jigdo file on fedoraproject pages. You can find it only 
> >> on http://fedoraunity.org/solved/post-install-solutions/jigdo/ and it 
> >> actually is not a "one click" method (btw: pyjigdo I did not found in 
> >> repos for F8, or am I wrong?). Would it be worth droping at least note 
> >> at get-fedora pages what to do with those jigdo files, if we do not 
> >> have an application to asociate them in web browser?
> >>
> >> Adam Pribyl
> >>
> > 
> > Jigdo provides the ability to build ISOs locally by pointing at existing 
> > packages you already have in conjunction with a jigdo file (which 
> > provides paths to mirrors to obtain packages which you may be missing 
> > and a list of the packages needed to build a particular ISO) and a 
> > template file that provides the basis of the ISO you wish to build.  If 
> > don't have a majority of the packages locally, in my experience, it 
> > faster to get ISOs via bittorrent or directly from a mirror.
> 
> A problem or two with bittorrent:
>    IAPs don't particularly like it; some throttle peer2peer by various 
> means, some who didn't are starting to charge for uploads.
>   ADSL and (I think) are asymmetric protocols for exchange of data. It's 
> predicated on the assumption users download more than upload. With 
> bittorrent and the like, that's not so and it can cause bottlenecks that 
> are bad for other users.

Actually ADSL is less affected than cable broadband, precisely because
it limits upload speeds. The real problem with P2P at the moment is that
ISPs are offering more than they can deliver, i.e. the relevant
underlying assumption is that the user is only consuming bandwidth in
occasional bursts, not continuously. P2P changes the equation, hence the
current fight about throttling by some ISPs. Note that this is not so
much a backbone problem as one of capacity of the last mile, and once
again it's usually the cable users who are more affected because they
have a shared medium.

poc