The preferred way of getting
ISO CD images of the
Debian Linux distribution. To Debian purists, it's genius incarnate and
the best thing since sliced bread. To most everyone else, it's a worthless piece of crap software. I'll try to explain both of these.
Basically, it first gets all the .deb packages that will be contained in an image from a Debian package mirror. Then, it puts them all into a big file and does an rsync with a CD image mirror to turn that file into an exact copy of the official image.
So what's so great about it? Well, the rsynching requires relatively little data transfer (only a couple of megabytes). Apparently the Debian fans assume that everyone has a complete Debian package mirror at home, leading them to proclaim that the pseudo-image kit is "blazingly fast" and "finishes in a matter of minutes". This may be true for them, but generally, it's a load of bull. What it really does (and what makes it beneficial) is to redistribute bandwidth-guzzling CD image downloads from the (few) CD image servers to the (many) package servers. This wouldn't be necessary if there were more CD image servers; and they wouldn't be overloaded if there were more of them, either.
OK, so now we know the benefits, but who do some people actually hate the pseudo-image kit? Because it's an brittle crock, that's why. It requires you to do a lot of manual work and get various server names from outdated lists when all of this could be painless and comfortably automated.
Yeah I know: if you don't like it, do it better yourself. But I don't think the entire concept is all that great to begin with, and the only thing that really irks me is that people are hyping a crappy implementation of a not-so-great concept.