The start has finally arrived, today is officially the first day of coding for the 2007 Google Summer of Code.

To commemorate this occasion, I have prepared the next release (the second so far) of the software package I am writing for it, DebTorrent. You can download it from the Alioth project.

Some of the changes in this release are:

• Added ability to parse dpkg status for priorities of files to download
• Fixed a bug in bittornado that prevented using priorities with pre-allocation
• Directories are no longer pre-allocated when they will contain no files

You can read detailed instructions for how to download using it in the README file, but the basic idea for using DebTorrent as part of an update is to:

• Update your Packages files with apt-get update
• Download packages using DebTorrent and the new "statustodownload" option:
  • set it to 1 to download all packages currently installed
  • set it to 2 to download only new versions of installed packages
• Point Apt to the location of your downloads
• apt-get update again, and then install

This is still an alpha release, but at least it has some more functionality than the previous one. Feel free to test it, but keep in mind that at this early stage most of the torrents will be unseeded.