[Mageia-dev] Mirror layout, round two

[Michael scherer]

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