Torrent Talks
| This article is a stub. You can help the wiki by expanding it. |
Background
The intuition is people who don’t want ‘live' TerraSync use bitTorrent or something like terrasync-fs / a script to pull the entire scenery from a mirror, and hence don’t have much need for a management tool.[1]
We need *some* free option (Torrent being the obvious established one that won’t even cost ‘us the project’ anything to offer, despite my general reluctance to push non-technical people to what is inevitably a malware-riddled experience)[2]
So while 16k EarthView textures are lovely, we should definitely figure out a hosting + delivery method which is opt-in, and doesn’t overload our current we-get-it-for-nothing providers :)
(And indeed Bittorrent might be one solution)[3]
Issue
it’s not an approach that works for ‘FlightGear the project’ - 90% or something of the userbase are on Windows. Lots of them are not so technical, and when we have done solutions which may assumptions about their setup, we generate large support problems which we have no resources to deal with. (This is why we don’t use SVN as the TerraSync backend anymore)[4]
Idea
Prototype
We need to actually write a prototype, using libtorrent (or whatever is $sexy these days). Which would be welcome, just keep in mind it has to be a library solution we can ship as part of FlightGear, including on macOS and Windows: which means no weird malware installation or Windows Firewall warnings about us looking like malware...[5]