[Mageia-dev] Mirror layout, round two

[Ahmad Samir]

On 27 November 2010 11:13, Michael scherer <misc at zarb.org> wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 27, 2010 at 09:00:50AM +0200, Ahmad Samir wrote:
>> On 27 November 2010 08:27, Andrey Borzenkov <arvidjaar at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > On Fri, Nov 26, 2010 at 11:29 PM, Thomas Backlund <tmb at iki.fi> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> The idea of this layout with some of the separate sections (codecs,
>> >> firmware, games, non-free, debug_*) gives a mirror maintainer in a country
>> >> (or company) the option to exclude the parts they legally (or by company
>> >> policy) can not mirror.
>> >>
>> >
>> > I wonder how "urpmi.addmedia --distrib
>> > ftp://server/with/omitted/sections" should be interpreted then.
>> >
>> > Also mirror list should be indicating which sections are present; is
>> > it supported right now?
>> >
>>
>> IMHO, the mirrorlist in its current status should be dropped
>> altogether... it's only good if the user has good mirrors near where
>> he lives, otherwise it just fails miserably. The whole point of using
>> a mirrorlist was that "urpmi will switch to another mirror if the
>> currently used one fails / can't be reached", that switch doesn't
>> happen, ("md5sum mismatch" rings a bell?).
>
> In fact, md5 mismatch happen when the md5sum come from one mirror, and the hdlist
> from another one. This part of the urpmi code is too complex, and I didn't
> understood exactly the way it should work ( I mean, we could
> have a method "download" that does the right thing, switch to another mirror, etc, but
> it seems much more complex and therefor hard to fix ).
>
>> At least with the specific media mirrors the user can, more easily,
>> guess that he can use add another mirror, with mirrorlist most new
>> users are left clueless.
>
> IMHO, that's a bug that must be fixed. I have already attempted, but
> without any luck. And shall I also remind that this was asked by users ( ie
> most non new users have no trouble with a single mirror ).
> So if we remove, some users will ask us again to have it...
> --
> Michael Scherer
>

The mirrorlist is a good method, _if/when_ it works. As it stands it
doesn't work except if the user has a good mirror near him that urpmi
will select; otherwise the user has to select a mirror manually, not
so nice for new users as they just click "Add" in drakrpm-edit-media.

A search in bugzilla and the mdv forum will reveal that a lot of users
got hit by that issue and are still getting hit by it....

-- 
Ahmad Samir