I created pypt-offline with the hope that it’d be useful for people who don’t have an internet connection but would still like to enjoy Debian. Enjoying Debian is about enjoying its Package Manager, APT. I don’t have any data to show if pypt-offline is in use by anybody. I too, use it rarely, when at my hometown. But I hope people who use it, find it useful.
At my hometown, I use internet service from my friend’s ISP. I have a 10kb/s connection at home. That’s slow.
And I’ve been using KDE 4.2 in Debian. The Debian KDE team decided to defer public availability of KDE 4.2 Beta packages for a good reason. But I did want to use it and find more bugs, sooner. So I ended up with the unofficial sources. There, it comes packaged almost every 2 days. That ends up being a 600-700 mb download quite often. (This includes the debug packages).
Being at home and downloading 700 megs of deb is painful. So I rushed to my friend’s ISP. There I can get 500kb/s bandwidth. But apt didn’t want to play good. The problem is that apt is not threaded. So from a single source, only a single download can be initiated. That ended up me using on 120kb/s bandwitdth to download. That was time consuming. I wanted it to be downloaded faster so that I could spend more time at home.
That’s when I thought of using pypt-offline. When I designed pypt-offline, one of my requirements set, was threads. pypt-offline is threaded. This ended up being very helpful for me. I was able to utilize the bandwidht upto 600 kb/s by using 5 threads. This has yielded in faster download for me, while it must be choking the bandwidth for the server
I wish if apt was threaded. But I think it isn’t threaded for good reasons. Having a threaded apt will end up with excess load on Debian servers. But then, if you really want fast downloads and do have the bandwidth, do give pypt-offline a try. And yes, you can try it on Windows/Linux/Mac.
It makes me happy today to see a good use of pypt-offline.