FOR FUTURE REFERENCE: when rsync.macports.org is down hard...

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Nov 24, 2014, at 3:17 PM, Dave Horsfall wrote:

> On Mon, 24 Nov 2014, Lawrence Velázquez wrote:
> 
>> There's no particular reason to stick with the "primary" MacPorts 
>> servers, if you find a mirror that works better for you. I'm not aware 
>> of problems with any of the mirrors. If you're not in North America, you 
>> might even benefit from switching sources permanently.
> 
> Seeing as MacPorts is based upon FreeBSD ports, perhaps it could copy the 
> latter's trick of trying servers one by one?
> 
> A minor problem with FreeBSD is that should an ISP-assigned DNS server 
> report an error, said ISP helpfully redirects you elsewhere, but luckily 
> FreeBSD handles this stupidity (I'm looking at you, BigPond Australia).

When MacPorts was created in the early 2000s it was inspired by FreeBSD, but it doesn't share any code with it, and isn't even written in the same languages.

MacPorts does use the behavior you describe, of trying a mirror until success, for packages and distfiles, but not for selfupdate or sync, since until this recent failure I don't think we've ever had an extended outage of the main rsync server.