Hello,
Why isn’t there any official way to download NixOS with bittorrent ?
It’s in my opinion a much better and reliable way to download linux ISOs, also the majority of them has a way to download torrent files for their images (ubuntu, debian, qubes OS, archlinux, etc.).
Adding torrent downloads makes little sense IMO, because NixOS isos tend to be relatively short-lived. Hydra always builds fresh ones from the stable branch. For example, the isos linked on the website right now are only 15 hours old.
That seems to be a reason to have a torrent. New releases have a more effective way to propagate. I just don’t know if this is a problem worth solving. Adding a torrent would be easy, but someone would have to setup and maintain an effort to keep some amount seeded.
There is a way to include webseed to torrent file so torrent-client would download iso file via http when there is no seeds yet:
mktorrent -a <sometrackeruri> -w <isourl> <isofile>
I wasn’t aware making a torrent could be as easy as this. What goes in “sometrackeruri” though? Any random tracker link? Sounds surprising because the tracker needs to know what it’s tracking right?
I guess op’s point is that torrents have built in download manager. With misuzu’s post, you get the best of both worlds.
Any public tracker is fine.