Bug#907704: choose-mirror: default to deb.debian.org
On Mon, Sep 03, 2018 at 08:13:55PM +0200, Karsten Merker wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 03, 2018 at 04:41:10PM +0200, Julien Cristau wrote:
> > Control: tag -1 + patch
> >
> > On 08/31/2018 06:27 PM, Julien Cristau wrote:
> > > Package: choose-mirror
> > > Severity: wishlist
> > > X-Debbugs-Cc: tfheen@debian.org
> > >
> > > I think it's time for choose-mirror to stop asking by default. AFAIK
> > > deb.debian.org works well enough now that we don't need users to
> > > manually select a mirror close to them.
> > >
> > > PoC patch, completely untested:
> > >
> > Updated patch, at least somewhat tested. It downgrades the debconf
> > priority for mirror/http/countries and mirror/http/mirrors so they're
> > not asked by default (previous patch would still ask for a country).
> > Only the "proxy" question remains; I'd kind of want to skip it by
> > default unless we find out we can't get at the mirror directly, but
> > that's something for another bug/patch.
>
> Hello,
>
> I can see the argument for not asking to select a mirror when
> there is a well-working mechanism for automatically choosing a
> "near" (in networking terms) mirror. Does deb.debian.org fulfill
> everybody's needs in this regard? ISTR that there were some
> discussions in the past that deb.debian.org didn't resolve to
> particularly useful mirrors for some parts of the world, but I
> have no idea whether that is still a problem. My personal
> experience with deb.debian.org hasn't been that great - instead
> of redirecting me to the Debian mirror that is run by my local
> ISP (and that is in d-i's mirrorlist), it redirects me to an AWS
> instance hosted rather "far" away in networking terms.
>
> Regarding hiding the proxy question: I'm not sure that it would
> be a good decision to hide the proxy question by default. Being
> able to connect to the mirror directly doesn't mean that one
> doesn't want to use a proxy, in particular when a package-proxy
> like apt-cacher-ng is available in the local network.
> Personally, I would prefer if the proxy question remains
> at default debconf priority.
I disagree with that, but I do also agree that it would be preferable if
local proxies or mirrors were used preferably.
However, this shouldn't be done by way of manual configuration; instead,
I think it should be done by way of autodetection performed by apt,
something not unlike the proxy-PAC scheme, where a browser looks for
pac.<domain>, with the <domain> part being what was passed to it by
DHCP, incrementally dropping off the leaf-most part of that until it
resolves.
I think such a scheme could work for apt too.
--
Could you people please use IRC like normal people?!?
-- Amaya Rodrigo Sastre, trying to quiet down the buzz in the DebConf 2008
Hacklab
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