Upgrade Improvement

[Virakor]

I just recently became an Ubuntu user with Edgy and now as I sit here waiting for the upgrade program to finish for Feisty I was thinking of ways to improve it.

Would it be possible to do this?

Before you start downloading files the upgrade program downloads a list of md5checksums from a central server. Then loads that checksums into a database and then uses a bit torrent style of downloading for actually obtaining the packages themselves. The program checks every package against the checksums and if it matches it installs and if it doesn't it tries to download again.

I believe this method of doing things would greatly improve the performance of upgrading especially the few days after a release when the servers are hit hard.

Sorry if this post is in the wrong forum I couldn't find anywhere I could put this.

[justin whitaker]

Ulteo, Gael Duval's new project uses something like this. It's sort of a continuous, distributed update. I can't say if it is good or bad, since I have not used it....given the size of the Ubuntu community, something like that just might work.

[esaym]

I thought it already did this?