vab: take a look a
Mojo Nation
for your free
software distribution p2p network idea. Using a p2p network
such as mojonation or freenet to distribute packages would
be excellent. (can anyone drool as they envision apt-get
using a p2p network to get packages instead of silly
ftp/http mirrors)
Mojonation and freenet both have the advantage of
content being addressed by secure hashes. The only thing
that
would need to be signed (if you actually implementing
signing) are the indexes that list what the hash ids needed
to get the packages are.