Download sources from servers that don't respond to ping

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Oct 3, 2009, at 11:58, Jann Röšder wrote:

> I noticed, that at the moment servers which do not respond to Pings  
> are
> not considered as sources. This sounds reasonable, but unfortunately
> there are some servers out there that work just fine even though  
> they do
> not respond to Ping messages. So I request that sources with a ping
> value of 10000 are still considered.

MacPorts used to download from servers in the order specified in the  
portfile. This was not optimal as slow servers listed first would  
always be tried before possibly faster servers listed later.

MacPorts 1.7 changed this to ping all download servers and try them in  
ping order. If a server does not respond to ping or is offline, it  
will be at the bottom of the list and will be tried last.

This is not perfect because as you say some servers might not respond  
to pings (though hopefully that's rare), and some servers that respond  
quickly to pings may not actually be fast at sending the file, but it  
was easy enough to implement and better than what we had. We're open  
to suggestions on further improvements for auto-selecting fast  
download locations.