On Sep 24, 2007, at 9:57 AM, Daniel J. Luke wrote:
1. How do we determine what continent a user is in? Automatically? (How?) Or the user specifies it manually? (Where, how?)
Just default to North America, it's close enough to the center of the internet anyway (some networks only interconnect in the US, so traffic will route there anyway). It's essentially the same as what we have now.
What about a user-initiated step (port test-mirrors?), cached into one of the .conf files, that would simply compare ping results among the available mirrors. It could simply store the fastest mirror as the one to use. A user might be able to re-run the test periodically to determine the current fastest mirrors. Perhaps we could follow some of the work done to find the fastest FreeBSD cvsup servers... <http://ipucu.enderunix.org/view.php?id=553&lang=en> We already retain a list of mirrors for a given id (sourceforge, gnu, etc.), so we know the servers to query. MacPorts could store a "preferred mirror" for each id based on the fastest ping results. Chris