Discussion on potential need for zsync replacement (or other steps for the future)

[AyoungDukie]

At the start of 2024, the zsync project's hosting went down and their last mailing list activity seems to have been in 2016 (though it seems from archive.org that it was up the prior week). It has since been brought back up. Their source is still up on Github to allow compiling from source (and there are already built binaries in repos, etc), but the episode made me wonder if an alternative could be good to evaluate for the future? Or perhaps it may be worth forking to bring into active maintenance?

Some similar tools I've seen discussions around

• zsync-curl (still last updated 3 years ago)
• zsync2 (seems to still be WIP and may not be fully stable)
• casync (seems to address similar uses, and is actively maintained by the systemd team)
• desync (a casync implementation in Go)

FWIW, it does look like folks looked into utilizing casync for Nix purposes (though this effort was rolled into Tvix.

~~Otherwise, if anyone knows who to contact, perhaps the zsync hosting site could be renewed?~~