Comment 1 for bug 155298

Actually, I've just found out about debtorrent and apt-p2p. So other people are working on this problem, and in fact others are attempting to organise users to use one of these protocols for the Intrepid upgrade.

All (!) the update-manager devs need to do, then, is to make it straightforward for a user to use one of these protocols for updates. When the user selects the Peer-to-Peer option, update-manager can grab the required packages and make the necessary changes to sources.list. Since both these protocols fall back to standard http: transfers, this should be pain-free for the user.

Changes to the firewall would be necessary to seed the files, which isn't necessarily something that novice users would be able to do, but even having those users leeching the files from those users who are capable of making firewall changes would still serve to reduce the load on the Ubuntu servers.

Adoption of one or both of these protocols by a high-profile distribution like Ubuntu would aid these projects enormously. It may be necessary to devote some resources initially to these projects to steer them to the level of maturity that would be required for such widespread adoption.

Integration with update-manager would create a useful configuration point to cap upload speeds for a given user. This work would, at a minimum, serve as a useful basis for all deb-based distributions, and the solution of the basic problems would also be useful for rpm-based distributions. It could also form part of any unifying efforts to standardise software distribution in the GNU/Linux community.