About the distributed downloading of the LimeWire installer of course a number of things would need to be worked out but the idea of using the network to download the app is very cool and thinking of this some time ago I did a search for LimeWire on LimeWire and I did get some results for what looked like the installer or the .exe file.

Considering what applications do for somewhat related things, AOL for a period of time, maybe currently, placed a duplicate copy of the installer in the Mac System Folder to allow a reinstall in case the user deleted the original installer. The Lime installer could place a copy of the installer in the shared directory or better yet in some less user-prominent location to discourage tampering and be used for the distributed download. I give this extra step even with the extra disk space needed as some people delete or move the installer they downloaded soon after installation.

Hashes or keys or something along those lines would be very important to avoid bad copies.

On upgrades, I started using LimeWire at version 1.3 and when version 1.4 came out I was eventually going to upgrade but one time when I opened the app it asked to upgrade automatically. I let it do so and the upgrade was problem free. I was very impressed. For some reason or maybe the later versions I used were too old from the current version I never got one of those helpful dialogs about upgrading since then. Unless if there are very major changes with the software, upgrades are smaller than full applications so future full installers should also share the download page with upgrade installers. Sometimes upgrades can get messed up but at least provide the option and make smaller (upgrade) files available.

For the compact downloader prog, the QuickTime installer/updater for the Mac at least is a small piece less than 100 K that figures out what is needed for the particular system and then downloads the data to a download cache of sorts and then does the installation.

But for now if more copies of the LimeWire installer were available on Gnutella or just by adding regular mirrors that may reduce load on limewire.com slightly. Most of the challenge is trusting a binary download from a host that is not the original source of the software.