On Sep 22, 2007, at 17:56, paul beard wrote:
On 9/21/07, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
On Sep 18, 2007, at 21:49, paul beard wrote:
as I watch my port upgrade process scroll by (as much as progress on an 800 MHz G4 can be called scrolling), I wonder if there is some way to fetch from geographically nearer mirrors. Lyon, FR, is a long way from here, and even if they have oodles of bandwidth, avoiding trans-oceanic hops is probably a good idea.
I know I can hack the order of mirrors but that's not persistent. Would there any way to add a list per continent or region with that region specified at install time?
As I recall you've brought this up several times, but I think the idea needs to be fleshed out more and more-precisely defined: exactly how would this feature work, how would it behave, how would it be implemented, would there be any downsides, etc. Developer time is limited, and we have very few people who are comfortable coding in base, so a much more precise specification of the feature is needed.
several times? Yikes, I sound like a nag ;-)
Not at all; I just meant that, while I agree in principle that it would be more efficient to fetch from closer sources, how to accomplish that in a way that makes sense for all of MacPorts is not yet clear to me. Or, I could think of a few possible solutions, but haven't worked through them completely to see what issues there might be.
I think something as simple as a per continent or region list of mirrors is all that's needed. North America-based installs would use mirrors on that continent, European-based folks would use theirs, etc.
Issues I see here: 1. How do we determine what continent a user is in? Automatically? (How?) Or the user specifies it manually? (Where, how?) 2. Not all ports fetch their distfiles from the same servers. Far from it. See: http://trac.macports.org/projects/macports/browser/trunk/base/src/ port1.0/resources/fetch/mirror_sites.tcl Some ports fetch from gnome's servers (there's your Lyon, France server), some fetch from gnu servers, some fetch from sourceforge, and so on. And many, many ports do not use any servers in this list; they just specify a master site URL (or several URLs) directly. Your "per continent or region list of mirrors" wouldn't help those ports that fetch from specific URLs, but let's look at it anyway. How would you do it? Would you duplicate mirror_sites.tcl per continent and reorder the URLs in each? That would make it inconvenient to ever make any changes (add, remove or change a URL; add or remove a category) as the change would have to be made in several files at the same time. It would be easy for someone to forget, and for the files to become out of sync. I think it's a bad idea. It would be better to keep a single list, but to add some kind of geographic information to each URL, be that country or continent or whatever. Here is a previous thread you started on this topic: http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-users/2007-June/ 003826.html I attempted to direct the thread to the macports-dev list (since it relates to the development of MacPorts, not its use) with a lengthy reply with several ideas which expand on the above: http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-dev/2007-June/001857.html There wasn't a whole lot of discussion after that though. Maybe there will be more input this time around. I will attempt the same redirection with this thread now: please reply only on the macports-dev list (edit "macports-users" out of the Cc list when replying).