I've been thinking of altering Freebase's RSS feed so a gnutella client can subscribe, and can queue up a new file as soon as it becomes available (it probably wouldn't be a good idea to do it fully automatically, but just displaying new files in adialog with a description and an option to start a download would be nice). But sadly no client supports that yet. Some BT clients exist that can do that, though (but with torrents, not magnets). I think a feature like that would make file distribution more efficient too (lots of people would be downloading the same file simultaneously).

Someone's writing an rss plugin for Shareaza, but i don't think it's going to be finished soon. Ofcourse, it's pretty trivial to start generating a magma-list and a collection too, in php, but I'd prefer rss, because that's designed for pushing content. (magma lists and collections are more 'pull': the user downloads the file, parses it, and looks at what he wants. With rss, the user only sees the new files, and can choose to download a file as soon as it becomes available).

And using RSS would save me from confusing users with too many choices. They can open the rss file with any reader, and if that reader happens to be a gnutella client, the client can take care of downloading the files as soon as they're available.

Do you mean alt sources or http sources?
If you mean alt sources, it would break the cache, as I'd have no way to track the people that click the magnet (unless I add the cache as a source too).

If you mean http sources: I'm not really sure about which one would be best. I'd like to be able to send the http sources selectively, because if I just send them with every download, you might aswell just do http downloads. The gnutella client will barely download anything from gnutella. I'd just send a http source if there are no or few alt sources available for that file. And if people copy the magnet to their own site, I can update the http source without breaking the copied magnet.

A drawback would be that it'd tie the cache more to the website. http sources will have to be stored in another table, and that would be the table where all the files on freebase are stored. With adding http sources to the magnet, I wouldn't have that problem (but the http sources would be there every time, making every download essestially a http download).

edit: i tried sending a http source through the cache, but Phex doesn't accept it. (probably a protection so http sources don't end up in the alt source mesh). In fact, I think I tried doing it before with Shareaza, and I removed it again when it didn't work. So I guess I'll have to add sources directly into the magnet then.

I'd also like to know where exactly Phex stores its debug log (on Linux).