Apt-Offline

I am very pleased to announce the release of apt-offline, version 1.5.

In version 1.4, the offline bug report functionality had to be dropped. In version 1.5, it is back again. apt-offline now uses the new Debian native BTS library. Thanks to its developers, this library is much more slim and neat. The only catch is that it depends on the SOAPpy library which currently is not stock in Python. If you run apt-offline of Debian, you may not have to worry as I will add a Recommends on that package. For users using it on Microsoft Windows, please ensure that you have the SOAPpy library installed. It is available on pypi.

apt-offline 1.4 has been released [1]. This is a minor bug fix release. In fact, one feature, offline bug reports (–bug-reports), has been dropped for now.

The Debian BTS interface seems to have changed over time and the older debianbts.py module (that used the CGI interface) does not seem to work anymore. The current debbugs.py module seems to have switched to the SOAP interface.

There are a lot of changes going on personally, I just haven’t had the time to spend. If anyone would like to help, please reach out to me. We need to use the new debbugs.py module. And it should be cross-platform.

It is still 2012 in this part of the world and the world is still intact. Since nothing major happened, I thought of spending the new gifted time to add a long pending item to apt-offline. As shown in the screen shots, apt- offline’s GUI now has support to detect and display the downloaded offline bug reports.

This is part of the just released, version 1.3.

A copy of this article is also available here

This article is about Offline Package Management in Debian. Debian is a pretty well known project. One of the things that makes Debian very popular is APT (a.k.a Advanced Packaging Tool) which allows remote package downloads, upgrades and dependency resolution. Unfortunately it does require a network connection - unless you use apt-offline.

I just completed the release of apt-offline version 1.1. This release has many bug fixes, adds basic proxy support and has a new Advanced Options window for the Get operation.


Hello World.

I am very pleased to announce apt-offline , version 1.0.

This release adds a Graphical User Interace to apt-offline.

Big thanks to Abhishek Mishra and Manish Sinha who did all the development work to make this GUI happen.

Help: I was wondering if there is a logo for APT that I could use in the big blank space on the main window.

Apart from the GUI, there are a bunch of bug fixes in this release (which have already been made available for the Squeeze release also).

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.

My first contribution to FSF. pypt- offline is an offline package manager for Debian and its derivatives.