DESCRIPTION

The apt-transport-debtorrent package contains the APT debtorrent transport, which gets installed in /usr/lib/apt/methods. It makes it possible to use 'deb debtorrent://localhost:9988/foo distro main' type lines in your sources.list file. You don't need to run the method yourself, it will be started automatically by APT.

This manual page documents briefly the options available to the debtorrent method. For an overview of the DebTorrent program, see the 'debtorrent' package.

You don't actually need this package to use the DebTorrent program, it will work fine using the regular http:// transport.

However, using this method has some advantages over HTTP. Unlike the traditional HTTP method, this transport will send all possible requests to DebTorrent as soon as it recieves them, which will speed up the download as peers can be contacted in parallel. This method also allows the DebTorrent client to return files to APT in any order, which is important since BitTorrent downloads proceed in a random order. Additionally, this method uses a very similar protocol to HTTP, and so can easily be used to access a DebTorrent client running on another host.

OPTIONS

The options below are used by APT when calling the debtorrent method. For a description of how APT reads these options, see the apt.conf man page. The options are available to be modified in the /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20debtorrent file.

Acquire::debtorrent::Timeout seconds;

the number of seconds of inactivity before the request will timeout and the method will give up (defaults to 300)

Acquire::debtorrent::NoCache true|false;

if this is true, then APT will not store copies of the downloaded package files in its cache (defaults to false)

Debug::Acquire::debtorrent true|false;

whether to output debugging messages while the method is downloading files (defaults to false)

AUTHOR

This manual page was written by Cameron Dale <[email protected]> for the Debian system (but may be used by others). Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU General Public License, Version 2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation.
 

On Debian systems, the complete text of the GNU General Public License can be found in /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL.