mirrorlist plugin broken?

[Florian La Roche]

> > Ok, I'll have to ping some other people on this.
> 
> The only problem I have with updating the original mirror lists is that
> the mirrors are not always out of sync. sometimes they're only out of
> sync for a day or so. So fixing them would mean having to put back the
> broken mirror later if it suddenly resynchronized.
> 
> Now, if I got the time I wouldn't mind putting all the mirror results in
> a little database and tracking them over time. so that mirrors that are
> in sync the majority of the time don't get checked as often or some such
> thing.

So this should be the following code then:
            for m in mirrors:
                if m.timestamps.has_key(arch):
                    if m.timestamps[arch] == canon.timestamps[arch]:
                        if debug: print 'adding %s' % m.url
                        glob_urls.append(m.url)
                    if m.country:
                        if not country_specific.has_key(m.country):
                            country_specific[m.country] = []
                        if debug: print 'adding to %s: %s' % (m.country, m.url)
                        country_specific[m.country].append(m.url)

Items I could think off:
- Timestamps are only checked for the big list, not for the per-country lists.
- You could also allow all timestamps which are not older than 2 days in addition
  to the exact match (which will then depend on good time setting on the machine
  doing the checks). Another possibility would be to allow older timestamps if their
  delta to the current timestamp is not too high, but that would then depend on
  frequent updates to go out.


> > >From their website I didn't think they have a reasonable free version.
> > The Fedora Extras package mentions a 97% accurate database for the
> > free version which does sound ok to me.
> 
> 97% is much better than what we had before :)

If that data is freely available, I'll start playing around with it. Much better
than taking the ending of hostnames or similar.

> > Let's see if .cgi holds up or if e.g. we can use the timezone setting
> > or other items to start with sane defaults.
> 
> the code is checked into /cvs/fedora/check-mirrors if you want to see if
> there are other ways of doing it.

Using the timezone sounds like another good guess, but will again need some
database mapping AFAIK. But I think we could also use this to set a better
default timezone selection based on the language selection within the
installer. I'll put this on my list for post-FC6 items to check out.

regards,

Florian La Roche