[Mageia-dev] Mirror layout, round two

Sat Nov 27 10:41:28 CET 2010

On 27 November 2010 11:13, Michael scherer <misc at zarb.org> wrote:
+> On Sat, Nov 27, 2010 at 09:00:50AM +0200, Ahmad Samir wrote:
+>> On 27 November 2010 08:27, Andrey Borzenkov <arvidjaar at gmail.com> wrote:
+>> > On Fri, Nov 26, 2010 at 11:29 PM, Thomas Backlund <tmb at iki.fi> wrote:
+>> >>
+>> >> The idea of this layout with some of the separate sections (codecs,
+>> >> firmware, games, non-free, debug_*) gives a mirror maintainer in a country
+>> >> (or company) the option to exclude the parts they legally (or by company
+>> >> policy) can not mirror.
+>> >>
+>> >
+>> > I wonder how "urpmi.addmedia --distrib
+>> > ftp://server/with/omitted/sections" should be interpreted then.
+>> >
+>> > Also mirror list should be indicating which sections are present; is
+>> > it supported right now?
+>> >
+>>
+>> IMHO, the mirrorlist in its current status should be dropped
+>> altogether... it's only good if the user has good mirrors near where
+>> he lives, otherwise it just fails miserably. The whole point of using
+>> a mirrorlist was that "urpmi will switch to another mirror if the
+>> currently used one fails / can't be reached", that switch doesn't
+>> happen, ("md5sum mismatch" rings a bell?).
+>
+> In fact, md5 mismatch happen when the md5sum come from one mirror, and the hdlist
+> from another one. This part of the urpmi code is too complex, and I didn't
+> understood exactly the way it should work ( I mean, we could
+> have a method "download" that does the right thing, switch to another mirror, etc, but
+> it seems much more complex and therefor hard to fix ).
+>
+>> At least with the specific media mirrors the user can, more easily,
+>> guess that he can use add another mirror, with mirrorlist most new
+>> users are left clueless.
+>
+> IMHO, that's a bug that must be fixed. I have already attempted, but
+> without any luck. And shall I also remind that this was asked by users ( ie
+> most non new users have no trouble with a single mirror ).
+> So if we remove, some users will ask us again to have it...
+> --
+> Michael Scherer
+>
+
+The mirrorlist is a good method, _if/when_ it works. As it stands it
+doesn't work except if the user has a good mirror near him that urpmi
+will select; otherwise the user has to select a mirror manually, not
+so nice for new users as they just click "Add" in drakrpm-edit-media.
+
+A search in bugzilla and the mdv forum will reveal that a lot of users
+got hit by that issue and are still getting hit by it....
+
+-- 
+Ahmad Samir
+