Pacman2pacman/summary

Pacman2Pacman is a plugin for pacman which allows it to download via bittorrent and HTTP mirrors simultaneously and transparently, and to "seed" downloaded packages back to other Parabola users. This reduces load on the mirrors, and makes Parabola more autonomous, by making package distribution less dependent on centralized hosts.

More importantly, the Pacman2Pacman network provides an extra layer of resiliency, which is absent from the standard federated mirror network. It is the "plan-b" cushion against any unexpected outages. It is also much easier to setup and operate than a complete mirror; and it can help, even if your computer is not always online, and even if you only share the packages that you have installed anyways.

The standard federated mirror network is quite strong; but it has a certain vulnerability, due to it's hierarchical nature. As with any federated network, there is an ever-present risk of partial or total blackouts. This p2p distributed (aka: de-centralized) distribution system allows Parabola to distribute software, even in some of the worse case scenarios (eg: DNS blackout, censorship, or total loss of the Parabola web servers infrastructure). However, it's health depends on the participation of Parabola users. Adding your disk space and bandwidth to the distributed network, and encouraging other parabola users to do the same, is actually preferable than growing the federated mirror network.