[steeve]

Question for the HN crowd: how does one can use DHT/trackerless to not only distribute files, but updates to them too?

Sort of like an ever continuing magnet link if you will?

[aroch]

BTSync is the obvious "Duh!" answer. Since its UDP traffic, controlled by DHT (so long as you disable their central tracker in your conf) and updates on the fly.

What I wind up doing (since I don't trust BTsync) is using inotify to watch the sync directory + mktorrent to create a new torrent on file change + pypush to push the new .torrent to various servers

[steeve]

Yeah but then you end up changing the info hash, and thus your magnet is changed.

What I'm trying to do is to basically embed the magnet link in my program and sort of having it self check itself for updates. It that makes sense :)

[fredsted]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the magnet link a hash of the files? Then it would not be possible to change the files without changing the link.

[steeve]

it is exactly that, unfortunately...

[dvanduzer]

Whether it's helpful for any current efforts using BT infrastructure, there's been a lot of work on this problem since Van Jacobsen sketched the outlines a few years ago:

http://named-data.net/

[revelation]

Well in theory you can store data for anything in a DHT, not only an infohash. So you could have your program query the DHT for the key "MySoftware-Latest" and store under that key the infohash for the latest version.

I don't know how much flexibility there is in popular DHT implementations as to what you can store for a given key, and you will need a server of yours to continuously refresh the data and keep it alive in the DHT.