tool used to download packages?

[D. Michael McIntyre]

On Tuesday 06 February 2007 3:25 pm, Andy Harrison wrote:
> What tool is used by apt-get and/or dpkg to download packages or
> perform updates from deb repositories?  Can it be changed to something
> else?

OK, you piqued my curiosity.  The answer is to use the source, Luke.

apt-get source apt-get

Have a look in the methods/ directory.  For example (this is the version in 
Dapper):

// $Id: http.cc,v 1.59 2004/05/08 19:42:35 mdz Exp $
/* ######################################################################

   HTTP Aquire Method - This is the HTTP aquire method for APT.

   It uses HTTP/1.1 and many of the fancy options there-in, such as
   pipelining, range, if-range and so on.

   It is based on a doubly buffered select loop. A groupe of requests are
   fed into a single output buffer that is constantly fed out the
   socket. This provides ideal pipelining as in many cases all of the
   requests will fit into a single packet. The input socket is buffered
   the same way and fed into the fd for the file (may be a pipe in future).

   This double buffering provides fairly substantial transfer rates,
   compared to wget the http method is about 4% faster. Most importantly,
   when HTTP is compared with FTP as a protocol the speed difference is
   huge. In tests over the internet from two sites to llug (via ATM) this
   program got 230k/s sustained http transfer rates. FTP on the other
   hand topped out at 170k/s. That combined with the time to setup the
   FTP connection makes HTTP a vastly superior protocol.

   ##################################################################### */


-- 
D. Michael McIntyre