why doesn't yum stay on the continent

[Benjamin Franz]

On Wed, 29 Mar 2006, Robin Laing wrote:

> Tim wrote:
>> On Tue, 2006-03-28 at 18:02 +0100, James Wilkinson wrote:
>> 
>>> The most prosaic one is that it isn't trivial for yum to work out
>>> which continent a user is on.
>> 
>> 
>> Surely it is.  Just read the information stating what timezone the
>> computer is located in.
>> 
>
> It wouldn't work for me as I am on one side of Canada but I connect to the 
> Internet on the other side.
>
> There are times that I can get a quicker download from overseas than in North 
> America.

Your case is an exceptional one that cannot be solved in general by 
passive location systems. It is the same problem as 'I'm in Canada but my 
proxy server is in Australia' for GeoIP. Pathological cases like that just 
cannot be generally solved by passive sytems because it is always possible 
to setup a configuration where a person's actual location is unrelated to 
their apparent network location.

But for better than 90% of people either GeoIP or using the timezone 
locale will produce decent results easily.

A dynamic 'learning' system that measured number of hops/network latency 
and adjusted preferred mirrors based on the learned network configuration 
could do even better as it learned what mirrors were probably good for a 
user and which were usually poor choices.

-- 
Jerry

If you can't handle reality, it *will* handle you.