eAPT: enhancing APT with a mirror site resolver

Abstract

Advanced Packaging Tool (APT) is a package manager used in Debian Linux distributions. By default, APT is configured to use the official central repository, but it also allows users to modify and add alternative repositories easily. Since using geographically closer servers can boost the download speed, many users adopt mirror sites in their country instead of the default repository. However, it is often challenging for users to select an appropriate mirror site. First, users have to change the repository URL manually with insufficient information about mirror sites. Second, if the mirror site in use is not working, APT cannot find an alternative mirror site in an automated manner. To address these problems and improve the user experience of APT, we propose the enhanced Advanced Packaging Tool (eAPT) which is built on the top of APT with a mirror site resolver to find the optimal mirror site based on the user’s geographical location in terms of the package installation time and stability even when some mirror sites are not responsible. Our experimental results demonstrate that eAPT is about between 8 and 10 times faster than APT for installing large sized packages (e.g., openjdk-11-jdk or android-sdk) in India and Australia.