Free mirror for .deb APT repository (forwarded correspondance)

[Scott Ritchie]

Hey guys.  For the past few days I've been corresponding with Pieter de
Bruijn, who has graciously offered us a huge amount of bandwidth to host
the APT repository for our .deb packages, rather than having to put it
in the sourceforge webspace where it is rather slow and times out a lot.

By my estimates, we get about 800 downloads of Wine from the APT
repository per day, which is about 10 gigabytes.  All other package
downloads from sourceforge combined constitute about 4000 downloads, so
roughly 20% of our package downloads are using the APT repository.  As
for what percentage of our user base uses current .debs, I don't know,
because more or less up to date Wine packages derived from mine can be
also grabbed from the Ubuntu backports server, the Ubuntu development
server, and likely some other place I don't know of.  It wouldn't
surprise me if over half our users were on Ubuntu at this point, though.

One important advantage of Peter's offer is that it allows us much more
storage space, possibly including multiple APT repositories for
different distributions.  This would be far preferable to the ~100 megs
or so we get on Sourceforge, which can barely fit one package.

Anyway, I'd like to inform everyone about the hosting offer and gather
some additional feedback, if you have any comments about the change.

Thanks,
Scott Ritchie