fetching from closer mirrors?

[cssdev at mac.com]

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