Hi I think you guys are doing a great job with APT. I'm not able to use APT all the time though. I have a LAN and a dial-up (local calls aren't free). I want to be able to share the packages I download with other people on the LAN. At the moment I'm using ftp which works quite well, even keeping the directory structure, so I only need to keep the Packages.gz files on my computer up to date, other people can then effectively get the files from my computer after I downloaded them from Debian mirrors. I also noticed that http mirrors are quite a lot faster than ftp but sadly I can't use the ftp method for http.
Couldn't you guys develop a small add-on that makes APT keep the files downloaded even after installed, in the same structure as on the Debian mirrors, including the Packages.gz files? If you guys think it's a dumb idea I'll probably learn C and try modify the source of the existing APT. Thanks Sarel Botha
