This package contains the APT debtorrent transport. It makes it possible to
use 'deb debtorrent://localhost:9988/foo distro main' type lines in your
sources.list file.

For an overview of the DebTorrent program, see the 'debtorrent' package, or
go to the homepage: http://debtorrent.alioth.debian.org/

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 receieves 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 DebTorrent downloads proceed in a random order.

This method uses a very similar protocol to HTTP, and so, like the http
method, can easily be used to access a DebTorrent client running on another
host on a local network.

To use the new transport, your /etc/apt/sources.list file needs to be
modified to use the new method. If your original sources.list had a line
like this:

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free

Then to access the DebTorrent client on the local machine using http on
the default port (9988) you would have changed the line to read this:

deb http://localhost:9988/ftp.us.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free

Now, to use the better debtorrent transport method, change the line to
this:

deb debtorrent://localhost:9988/ftp.us.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free

The port is unchanged from the one used for the http method. After making
that change, your downloads from DebTorrent should be faster.

The debtorrent APT transport method recognizes 2 parameters which can be
set in the standard APT configuration file at /etc/apt/apt.conf. These
configuration options can be set by adding the following lines to that
file (the default values are shown):

Acquire::debtorrent::Timeout "300";
Debug::Acquire::debtorrent "false";

The 'Timeout' value is used as the time to wait for a request from the
DebTorrent program to complete. It is longer than the default http
timeout because DebTorrent requests may take longer to begin as the
whole file needs to be downloaded before it can be transferred to APT.
Additionally, the debtorrent method will retry the request 3 times
before it will give up.

Setting the 'Debug' value to 'true' will cause the debtorrent transport
method to print out the headers sent to and received from the DebTorrent
client.
