Re: please add a find-the-fastest-mirror-automatically feature to setup.exe

["Jason Spiro" <jasonspiro4 at gmail dot com>]

Cc'ing the hackers of the Ubuntu "software-properties" app.

2008/5/23 Chris Sutcliffe <ir0nh34d@gmail.com> wrote:
> Jason Spiro wrote:
>> [Cygwin] Setup.exe is a great tool, but could you please add a
>> find-the-fastest-mirror-automatically feature?
>
> That would require making a connection attempt to every entry in
> setup's list, which would be rather counter-productive I would think.

What if Setup randomly tested just five or ten servers?

BTW, there are many mirror-testing servers out there.  (Ubuntu Linux
has a tool with a GUI interface called software-properties[1], with a
find-the-fastest-mirror-automatically feature called Select Best
Server.  You can see screenshots of the feature online.[2]  Fedora has
yum-fastestmirror.  Debian has netselect-apt, which is based on a tool
called netselect.  Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote a similar tool called
debian-mirrors which IIRC is no longer a Debian-only tool.)

And now, a question for the software-properties hackers I cc'ed:

Do you know?:  When is it worth the time it takes for users to test
various mirrors?  Is it worth it if they are planning to do just 2
minutes of downloading?  How about 20 minutes?  Is it useful for users
who have only, say, 128Kbps connections like DSL or "lite" cable?

Please Reply to All.  The cygwin-apps mailing list[3] will reject your
replies because you are not subscribed but I will forward them to the
list (or someone else can do it if they beat me to it.)

Regards,
Jason Spiro

^ [1]. https://code.launchpad.net/software-properties/

^ [2]. http://www.ubuntugeek.com/how-to-select-fastest-mirror-in-ubuntu.html

^ [3]. http://www.cygwin.com/lists.html#subscribe-unsubscribe