DebTorrent: the BitTorrent proxy for downloading Debian packages

Goal

To expand on the BitTorrent protocol and application to work effectively with large, constantly updating collections of files, and therefore enable the efficient peer-to-peer downloading of Debian packages from an APT repository.

Features

• Downloads from peers, increasing the available bandwidth to the user
• Reduces the bandwidth requirements needed to setup a repository of packages
• Seamlessly integrates with the current APT tool
• Automatically falls back to downloading from an HTTP mirror when peers are not available

This software is open-source and is released at no charge under the terms of the MIT license.

FAQ

Requirements

• Python 2.3 or higher
• An APT-based package management system (such as Debian distributions have)

Development Status

Development of this project is active and on-going, with several recent releases and several planned upcoming ones. The current software is considered to be beta quality, as it has all of the desired features and has been tested to work well for most people. Future updates will add features to make the downloading more efficient and the program more user-friendly.

Installing

There are detailed instructions on how to Install the DebTorrent program. If you have any trouble using the program, post a message or question to the developer mailing list, or come and find us in the IRC channel (#debtorrent on OFTC). If you think you've found a bug in the program, please report it using the standard reportbug program, and preferably following [[these guildelines|BugReporting]].

Contributing

There is currently a very small team of developers working hard to prepare the next release, but we could always use some help. Currently we are in need of new ideas and comments on old ones, testers, and developers familiar with APT. Feel free to update the website too, it's a wiki!

If you'd like to get involved or think you could help the project in any way, please join the developers mailing list.

The developers also hang out in the IRC channel #debtorrent on OFTC: irc://irc.oftc.net/#debtorrent.

Ideas for developing this project are mostly centralized around a wiki page on the Debian wiki (and a few sub pages). It details some of the problems being tackled, possible solutions to them, and has some proposals for implementing this project. Feel free to edit and add your own ideas to it, or comment on the existing ones.

The Code

The latest code for the project is currently hosted in a Subversion repository. It is originally based on the BitTornado code, though many modifications have been made to support the new protocol and features. It is publicly readable, and requests for write access can be sent to the developers mailing list.

• svn://svn.debian.org/debtorrent/debtorrent/trunk (anonymous access)
• http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/debtorrent/debtorrent/trunk/ (web access)
• commit mailing list for the subversion repository

Some documentation (API) for the code is available here.

The related apt-transport-debtorrent package also has code in the same Subversion reposiory.