[Mageia-discuss] Easyurpmi forMageia ?

[Wolfgang Bornath]

2011/5/23 Michael Scherer <misc at zarb.org>:
>>
>> As soon as the %MIRRORLIST system
>>  - checks the fastest mirror before using it
>
> So far, no one gave a working system to find which one is the fastest
> without a exhaustive test of all mirrors ( such a test would be quite
> wasteful from my point of view, and quite irresponsible for people with
> metered download ). And in fact, that's not what you likely want. You
> want a mirror that is fast enough to be limited by your current network
> connexion. If the ADSL connexion is full, that the mirror is giving 10
> or 100 mo directly to you doesn't matter much.

At Mandriva we had mirrors with much less bandwidth. So, I may have
been wrong in this point. You can't easily check the speed *before*
each transaction. But urpmi/rpmdrake should have an option to switch
to a different mirror if it turns out that the system has chosen a
mirror with low bandwidth. Of yourse, if we only accept mirrors with
>= 100MBit then this is obsolete.

> 1) what is the current system ( I think it is based on the geographical
> position, which is a very very broad assumption, it help mostly to avoid
> brasil people fetching stuff from europa and thing like that )

Result is that they may be pointed to ibiblio - which is not really
helpful for them.

> 2) when did it gone wrong ( ie, the mirror that was selected and that
> shouldn't, and why, and how could we discriminate for a user )

The selection can be wrong from several causes:
 - it is not uptodate
 - it is not reachable or has a shaky connection (very often the case
with some Mandriva mirrors in Germany and East Europe)
 - it has an error in its hdlist (or whatever reasons an update can
not performed correctly from this mirror)

To make it easy we could leave all prior checks out but invent an
option for the user to switch to a different mirror on the list in
case of such problems.

>>  - checks the update status of the mirror before using it
> usually, for non cooker/cauldron, this is likely not a issue. Release is
> frozen, at worst, you have a security update being late.

It's an issue with all update branches of non-cauldron.

> On the other hand, we cannot force people to sync every 2h, and if a
> tier2 mirror sync every day, it can quickly become out of the list
> depending on the limit. If someone sync on a tier2 mirror that is
> already late ( for some network related reason, like in australia where
> the country is not that well connected to the rest of the world ), it
> will also be more late, and that would be a bad side effect.

Yes, but if it is late it is late, no matter what the reason, as a
user I would want to have the option to switch to another mirror which
is not late.

>>  - switches to another mirror if the selected mirror is not reachable
>> or not uptodate
> I tried to fix that part, but unfortunately, the code is "suboptimal".
> OTOH, using a manual mirror do not switch to a better mirror in case of
> problem too ( IIRC ).

That's right. But when I select a mirror manually I would select one
which is known as reliable, if that one is broke once in a lifetime I
would not switch but wait.

But reading all this I realize that we put much too much energy into
this discussion. As I wrote earlier in this thread I totally
understand that there may be technical or other reasons which may
stand in the way of changing something here. So, what would happen if
we do not change anything wrt this issue?
1. Users will go on using the mirrorlist system, no problem.
2. Users who know what to do will use their favourite mirror.
3. Soon we will have some 3rd party putting up a webtool as EasyUrpmi
or SmartUrpmi somewhere and this whole thread is obsolete.

-- 
wobo