On Sep 24, 2007, at 08:57, Daniel J. Luke wrote:
On Sep 22, 2007, at 9:10 PM, Ryan Schmidt 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.
For people on other continents who care - they can specify something in the ports.conf file to prefer their continent. The fetch lists would have to be sorted, and the fetch code modified to respect the new conf key (with fallback to other sites as needed).
And many, many ports do not use any servers in this list; they just specify a master site URL (or several URLs) directly.
And they would not benefit (I think that that's OK).
... anything more complicated than this is probably a waste of time. (In fact, most networks currently don't have the same problems with trans-oceanic connections that they used to)
... in any event, there's not much point in discussing this without a patch to implement it ;-)
On the contrary, I think it's very useful to discuss what a feature should do before someone tries to do it.