[aaravchen]

Ironically the first implementation of ostree required an HTTPS server to serve the ostree commits, allowing a much smaller subset of what's needed to be transferred. However that became an adoption hurdle since it required unique infrastructure. Ostree switched to using containers because zstd allows compressed chunks now rather than the old all-or-nothing image layers, and the existing widespread container image registry infrastructure could be reused without modification. And both utilize layers for their construction so there were possible benefits there (that never really materialized, but are still available to pursue).

[bigpod]

yea it switched to a in general much better distribution method then custom https server, for one thing authentication is built in something many of these https solutions forget(look at every linux package manager)