Package apt-cacher-0.7-1003

Apt-cacher is a caching proxy designed specifically for use by Apt. As a nice side effect, it also works perfectly with the Fink package management system for MacOS X, mainly because Fink is based on Apt. If you maintain a number of Debian machines, using a caching proxy for Apt has a number of benefits: * Saves you internet bandwidth by decreasing duplicate downloads of software packages * Decreases the load on the main Debian servers and mirrors (always a good thing!) * Increases performance of Apt for local users by delivering software from cache There are a number of alternative approaches and packages, such as using a Squid proxy or running a local mirror. However, there are good reasons for using Apt-cacher rather than the alternatives. Squid is generally not tuned for the very large objects typical of Debian software packages. It works best with lots of small objects typical of web page access, unless your change it's configuration: in which case you may lose some of it's effectiveness as a web cache. Local mirrors are generally very bandwidth wasteful, because they update all packages (including ones not being used by local machines) and update every time a package updates, rather than every time a user wants to upgrade a package on their computer. You can tune a mirror to reduce these issues, but that's hard and doesn't always work. The idea is that Apt-cacher should be something that is simple, specific and just works.