Comment 18 for bug 830492

Hi Sebastian.

I got progress to refresh on Thursday night. Software Centre works flawlessly for install and remove, and Update Manager works and shows progress but is missing details for files. Updating package information still works the old way, so those downloads still lock but are relatively small.

"I don't understand why you want to add a custom download tool? Apt already supports a variety of protocols."

So does Aria2. By using a dedicated download tool we save reinventing/reimplementing. Package Management in Ubuntu is moving towards Aptdaemon anyway. By all means add support in Apt, but I can't help out with that yet as my C is poor.

I'm hoping to add Bittorent support but in any case the BTIH would be required. It would be ideal if this was supplied along with the MD5, SHA1 and SHA256 hashes.

Using Aria2 or Deluge, we already have great features like Local Peer Discovery and DHT. LPD would allow a LAN to download updates only once rather than the number of Ubuntu machines on the LAN. Out-of-the-box! It would make many updates and installs a lot quicker, and save data throughput for both the LAN and Canonical's servers.

I'll look at your branch and I'm also in the process of cleaning up and preparing my branch. My code is still a bit messy because I'm inexperienced and new to Aptdaemon/Python-apt.

I'm hoping that these features will make it into Precise. I'm hoping to save some bandwidth for people, and make updates, installs and removes a lot quicker and more fluent.

Anyway, it will be a /lot/ harder to use Bittorent if there are no BTIHs available. Could they be computed on the repo servers along with the other hashes?

Thank you.