[jzelinskie]

>...and there were no such open issues with the http tracker protocol

This is because the HTTP protocol is so much overhead that most trackers don't even really run it anymore. I think UDP being promoted to the spec would've been a step in the right direction. Modern trackers have a bunch of tricks like BEP34[0] to avoid getting pounded that would be great if every client conformed to.

I hope I'm not coming off as aggressive. I really appreciate this work and I'm really glad to see a spec revision. It's just as you said, there's been many years and many good improvements that I'd like to see made while there's still a change to break things.

[0]: http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0034.html

[the8472]

I still don't see why this would need to piggyback on a breaking change of the metadata file format. "Please use UDP by default" is fairly orthogonal to the metadata format and could be added to the spec at any point if we want to.

HTTP trackers are considered fine for medium-scale torrent deployments. UDP trackers were originally introduced to cope with the traffic caused by running an open tracker that manages 100k+ infohashes for the whole world.

Also, both BEP3 and 52 already forward-reference the tracker extensions (compact and UDP), so someone who writes a new bittorrent implementation should already be aware of them.

Maybe we could make it more clear that some BEPs are almost-mandatory.