It might be possible to counteract the disadvantages of smaller files somewhat by using the same sort of technique as the bittorrent client, i.e. continue to serve the file even after it is downloaded. The time that apt spends downloading subsequent packages and installing the whole batch could be used to serve packages from the cache.
I don't think this ties in very well with the current Acquire interface, but I haven't looked at it with this in mind. The bittorrents could continue to run in the background after the download completed, but something would need to tell them to stop eventually. The other problem, I believe, is the creation and maintenance of .torrent files. -- - mdz
