[pacman-dev] Manual rankmirrors.

[Dave Reisner]

On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 08:49:48PM +0100, Kevin Chadwick wrote:
> I use rankmirrors and I notice on timeouts pacman automatically
> switches. Today, though most packages downloaded quickly from the
> mirror just selected by rankmirrors, one or two went very very slow. I
> guess differing routes by different package requests.

How about ranking mirrors by a metric that's actually meaningful?
rankmirrors uses ping, which is utterly worthless, as you're seeing
right here. Mirror selection should be based on:

1) locality (and hopefully that correlates with speed)
2) update-to-date-ness

We provide a tool on www.archlinux.org [1] that offers this already. If
you suffer from the inability to make decisions, you can use Reflector,
which merely parses a JSON representation of this page and suggests
something for you.

> Would it be easy to add a ^S (Ctrl-S) to tell pacman to stop and retry
> at the next mirror. If I ever find the time, not too likely for a
> while, I might look into it. Just figured if anyone had worked on it
> and thought yeah I could just change that then it wold be worth
> flinging the idea at the devs.

I'm glad you've thought this through. Ctrl-S is the canonical key
combination for most terminals to trigger flow control off. If you'd
like to actually code this up, you'll need to rig up a non-blocking FD
connected to stdin of the controlling terminal. Make sure it's portable
to BSD, Cygwin, and OSX.

d

[1] http://www.archlinux.org/mirrors/status/