yum version of "apt-get mirror-select"

[Luke Macken]

On Tue, 2005-10-18 at 13:48 +1000, Steffen Kluge wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-10-17 at 23:16 -0400, Luke Macken wrote:
> > Smart mirror selection will hopefully become a part of urlgrabber/yum in
> > the near future, but in the mean time I wrote a plugin,
> > fastestmirror[0], for yum (>= 2.4.0) to quickly determine the fastest
> > download mirror.
> 
> Now *that's* great! I've been maintaining manual mirror lists for ages,
> because yum would always pick the most lethargic ones first...
> 
> Allow me to report a bug, while we're at it :)
> 
> The plugin apparently just tries to connect to the server, without
> accessing any file. For me, this sometimes puts mirrors on top that
> aren't going to serve me:

I never said the mirror selection was smart ;)

> I suppose if the plugin tried to get a metadata file that should be
> identical on all mirrors this effect could be avoided. Then again, those
> files are being fetched from a random mirror anyway before the actual
> downloads even start. Maybe, when this feature gets integrated into yum,
> mirror selection could be combined with metadata download? Those files
> could be too big, though, and could cause mirror selection to take a
> long time...

Fetching metadata as well would definitely make the entire selection
procedure *much* slower, and doesn't seem suitable to be run every time
a download occurs.  I'm sure a better solution will pop up eventually;
but this plugin does it's job in the mean time.

All of the broken/dead mirror issues will be going away in the near
future once we get a mirror management system in place.


luke