Lee Wiggers wrote:
On Sun, 12 Feb 2006 22:33:10 -0700
Ron Hunter-Duvar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
In my experience, most of the North American mirrors are broken, some
permanently
So.....I'm surrounded by intellects. So why does urpmi
require me to pick a mirror? Why does it not check the
possibilities and put me on to the best at the moment?
Especially considering my fragile neophyte status.
Lee
Lee,
Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but I seriously doubt that
urpmi is aware of your status - fragile or not! Grin! Also, urpmi was
never built with those capabilities. Let's face it, it's a very
insensitive program.
Don't quote me on this, but I suspect that urpmi is told which mirror to
auto-select for you based either on the geographical location of the IP
address provided by your ISP, the time zone your system is set for
(which I doubt), or whether or not Venus and Mars are in proper
alignment over your home.
OK, maybe that last one is a bit far-fetched, but what the hell.
In order for urpmi to check all the possibilities and then to put you on
the best mirror available, it would need to ping each server for
response times (and many of them are blocking ICMP pings), then it would
have to download a sample of the package lists from each one, at which
point it would need a certain amount of Artificial Intelligence to
determine which one would be best suited for you.
My guess is that Mandriva never gave urpmi that much thought when they
were designing it and their first concern was to get the basics working.
Also, urpmi would need to become a very complex program if thy tried to
add those types of features into it.
One more thing, Dude. If Mandriva was going to spend that much time
rebuilding urpmi, they'd probably make the improvements available only
to Club members or folks that bought the commercial versions.
And let's not even get into the problems that this new urpmi would cause
for those folks who only have dial-up connections.
Guess you'll simply have to trudge along with the rest of us and find a
reliable mirror that hard way - by trial and error.
I realise that this isn't what you had hoped for, but at the same time,
Mandriva doesn't control those mirrors either. They too are at the mercy
of the mirror maintainers who also have to concern themselves about the
cost of bandwidth, so many of them limit the maximum download speeds per
connected user.
The only thing I can suggest at this point is to add the following at
the very top of your urpmi.cfg file (which will make urpmi save all the
packages you download in the /var/cache/urpmi/rpms folder;
{
downloader: wget
verify-rpm: 1
no-clean
}
Then find your self a good set of mirrors to use (as previously
suggested in this thread) and save your downloaded packages somewhere
else, once you've finished adding packages and/or updating.
That way, if they're ever needed again, you can re-use them without
having to download them again.
HTH's
Dan LaBine
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