apt-p2p: A Peer-to-Peer Distribution System for Software Package Releases and Updates

—The Internet has become a cost-effective vehicle for software development and release, particular in the free software community. Given the free nature of this software, there are often a number of users motivated by altruism to help out with the distribution, so as to promote the healthy development of this voluntary society. It is thus naturally expected that a peer-topeer distribution can be implemented, which will scale well with large user bases, and can easily explore the network resources made available by the volunteers. Unfortunately, this application scenario has many unique characteristics, which make a straightforward adoption of existing peer-to-peer systems for file sharing (such as BitTorrent) suboptimal. In particular, a software release often consists of a large number of packages, which are difficult to distribute individually, but the archive is too large to be distributed in its entirety. The packages are also being constantly updated by the loosely-managed dev...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Cameron Dale, Jiangchuan Liu
• Keywords: Communications, Free Software Community, INFOCOM 2009, Peer-to-peer Assisted Distribution, Software Packages