Users who follow a rapidly-changing distribution branch such as Ubuntu's development branch or Debian's "unstable" must download a large amount of data periodically in order to have an up-to-date index of available packages (the ``Packages.gz`` or ``Packages.bz2`` files).  Because very little of this data actually changes each time the index is updated, it would be more convenient if the new index could be retrieved by transferring only a delta, rather than downloading the entire index again.

Some prior discussion can be found at http://bugs.debian.org/128818

Apt in debian/experimental supports this feature now.

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