The integration of a P2P system with portage has the potential to speed up the download of install files, especially those that have not made it on to ibiblio.org yet. Use of MD5 sums (as we do already) means that this is just as secure a means of file distribution as we have at the moment. Of course, the user would have to install a server if she wishes to help distribute files, and some form of nearest neighbor searching would also be good. I would imagine that the server (and hence the network) would be gentoo-specific (although probably based on some other free P2P system) and would serve files out of /usr/portage/distfiles. It would be good to have the traditional HTTP and FTP download mechanisms rated against various P2P sources, and the best (combination of?) download mechanisms used to get the file.
A gentoo specific p2p distrubition system for distfiles is being worked on. Its purpose is mostly to reduce the load on our official mirrors, rather than speed up the download process. It will be optional and the conventional methods will still be available.
*** Bug 38930 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Potential module, but not of importance presently.
Consider this closed as WONTFIX This should be implemented as an external tool usable with FETCHCOMMAND
*** Bug 223989 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***