Re: RFC: countrychooser and IP location
On Sun, Sep 10, 2006 at 03:18:06PM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 10, 2006 at 02:03:08PM -0400, Joey Hess wrote:
> > Robert Millan wrote:
> > > +iplocated_country=`wget -q http://api.hostip.info/country.php -O - | head -c 2`
>
> > This is a third-party point of failure. Altough your code does
> > gracefully degrade if it fails. Would Debian be able to run this service
> > itself if we decided to use this? Or would that be a bad idea? Just
> > curious.
>
> > Anyway, I rather like the idea of doing IP location, but I lean more
> > toward only using the info to override the user's country in mirror
> > selection, rather than overriding the whole countrychooser. For one
> > thing, it wouldn't need to ask the user an insulting question ("do you
> > know what country you're in?") if the iplocated country was only used to
> > change the default mirror.
>
> If we're going to try to do smart detection of a preferred mirror, it seems
> to me that geopolitical boundaries are not the most significant factor.
> Intervening network topography, available bandwidth, and (in some cases,
> like with most ISPs in Australia) off-net traffic costs play a much bigger
> role in determining a user's mirror presence, IME. So if we're going to go
> down this road, wouldn't it be better to design for all of this?
Uhm right. So iplocation really only makes sense for localechooser, but it's of
no use there since we don't have network yet. Maybe this is a dead end.
As for mirror selection, you mean something like netselect?
--
Robert Millan
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