Fedora Bounties (seeking ideas)

[Luke Macken]

On Fri, Apr 21, 2006 at 01:57:33AM -0500, Callum Lerwick wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-04-20 at 20:09 -0400, Paul W. Frields wrote:
> > I did this by taking the old FC4 ".us.east" lists and (after
> > confirmation of the repos) including them on my system.  I wasn't sure
> > that was the accepted usage, but now it seems so.  I know there are
> > probably myriad ways to accomplish this with a more user-friendly bent,
> > but would it make sense for there to be a tool that asked the user to
> > select a geographic region, and populated a local mirror list
> > appropriately, using a remotely gathered list that included lat/long
> > data?  Does such a thing exist already and I'm just clueless?
> 
> I'm thinking of hacking yum-fastestmirror to rank based on number of
> hops to the mirror, this would get you the closest mirrors "as the
> packet flies", which is probably better than geographical proximity.

I would be interested in seeing how this works out.  I wrote the
connect() based mirror-selection algorithm to be fast, and
semi-accurate.

It might be nice to have multiple mirror-selection algorithms built into
fastestmirror, and selectable via a configure option.  This would allow us
to test the various techniques and see which yields the most reliable
results.

> Though it would still be nice to track actual transfer rates from each
> mirror. I don't know if that can be hacked on in a plugin. I really need
> to learn some python...

You could do this by pulling down a file from each mirror, and using the
average_rate() function in urlgrabbers RateEstimator[0] class.


luke

[0]:
http://linux.duke.edu/projects/urlgrabber/help/urlgrabber.progress.html#RateEstimator