[arch-general] rankmirrors and new mirrrorlist format

[C Anthony Risinger]

On Sat, Aug 14, 2010 at 8:27 PM, Jude DaShiell <jdashiel at shellworld.net> wrote:
> One of the more important fields missing from many Linux distros mirror
> lists is the geographical location field that would provide a country and a
> state/province for each mirror.  That information is stored in some data
> base on the internet, but not everybody who looks at a mirror list for the
> first time is necessarily going to know which tool to send the list through
> to get all those geographical locations appended to that mirror list.  A
> guess on my part would be the whois data base but what command to run to get
> the capacity the url, and the geographic locations out in a mirror list and
> only get that information I don't yet know.

i think the geographic info would be somewhat superfluous; while i
don't know of a command offhand to provide this information, the IP
address of mirrors can be geolocated.  additionally, geographic
location has little to do with your network location... when i lived
in montana (USA), every single packet i sent was routed through salt
lake city, utah, several hundred miles away, before going anywhere
else.

if anything, rankmirrors itself could provide this information; but it
wouldn't be that useful in deciding on a mirror.  just get the top 6
or so, pick one that works well, and forget about it :-)

kernel.org works fine for me.

C Anthony