fetching from closer mirrors?

[Ryan Schmidt]

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.