Consider dropping support for BitTorrent download
Why would we remove it?
- Making sure that our torrents work is on the critical path of the release process, and has sometimes delayed releases due to slow downloads from our BitTorrent seed (we did not research why).
- Our BitTorrent seed is 1 more service sysadmins have to pay attention to and maintain (likely pretty low cost, but it adds up).
- The BitTorrent tracker we use is 1 more 3rd-party service we contribute to financially (the money is not really a problem here; the communication overhead is).
- It adds a little bit of complexity for users in our installation instructions.
Why should we keep it?
- It's a quite popular option: in 2022-10, our Torrents were downloaded 23811 times (compared to 3813 times for our OpenPGP signatures).
- It takes some load away from our mirrors pool, which makes at least some HTTPS downloads faster.