Creation of "helper" program to speed download/install

[Atz]

Hey, people. I've been having trouble downloading the latest version of Wesnoth due to increasing size and my somewhat unstable internet connection (yes, I have tried download managers and such).

To that end, I was wondering if anyone has considered creating a "helper" program, similar to those used by Magic Online and the Spring Project, which use torrents in addition to/instead of a direct download. This could be used to reduce confusion over which torrent has the latest version, and help ensure that an appropriate torrent is available and being shared, which I believe are the main issues which have been raised with torrents in the past.

I'm not sure how difficult this would be to implement, so please excuse me if it would be a whole lot of work, but I think it would be helpful for users with poor connections - such as myself - and also speed the install process in general. It might also be possible to integrate this with the add-on system.

Comments?

[StDrake]

yuhuh, you can use things like getright
the matter of torrents is that simply someone would have to publish a correctly named .torrent file (correctly named to give clear info on version etc) and seed it

To sum it up - your issue can be gotten around without additional programming, nobody likes to do more work if not needed

there is however some potential in this idea, namely if done right it could make patching to newer versions easier, i dare you to grab your c++ and try making it yourself

[LittleBilly]

I came to the boards to suggest this very thing.

I don't know how patches and new releases work for Wesnoth, but even if all you did was maintain torrents of each release version, it would probably lessen bandwidth usage for the SF download server, as well as automatically solve broken download problems.

All that is required is that someone with a relatively stable and high bandwidth connection keep a copy of the software seeded, and act as the tracker. I don't think anyone would need to even crack open their C++ books for this, just add a torrent link to the downloads page, as most torrent clients support acting as a tracker (I know uTorrent does). The hard part is that the tracker would have to be up all the time. Does Wesnoth have its own server someplace we could leave the tracker running?

I see this as more of an infrastructural thing than a development thing, but as someone very new to the game, it struck me immediately that a 200mb+ download should have more than just the HTTP host, even if it is SourceForge.

[xivarmy]

There is the xdelta if you download the source code and keep the tarball, you can just keep downloading the much smaller xdelta, decompress and patch the tarball, recompile and install. Granted wesnoth is a fairly long compile, but it does reduce your downloading a fair bit.

(I've also not looked at the difficulty of compiling wesnoth in windows to know if this is a reasonable alternative to downloading a 200MB installer each time).

I'm also not sure how you think a torrent would speed up your download - sourceforge usually lets me download with all the bandwidth i can handle.