Apt-cross is intended to make it easier to locate, download, install and update your cross-compiling libraries, directly from the debian archives.

by default, apt-cross uses /etc/apt/sources.list to find the current debian package file for the architecture specified (or dpkg-cross default) and in the suite specified (default is unstable). alternatively, you can specify a different mirror. downloaded files can be passed directly to dpkg-cross using the -b or -i commands to apt-cross.

includes a helper script to support the transition to multiarch.