Re: where to sync from?
Actually, there is a solution :) I'm involved in a project called
metalink (some of you may heard about it) which is targeted to file
downloads.
The purpose of metalink is to allow users to download a file from
multiple locations (eventually using multiple threads). Reading this
thread, I'm thinking that metalink can be used to implement simultaneous
downloads from multiple mirrors at the same time.
This may involve:
*) modifying wget to implement metalink support
*) create metalink files for all debian packages
The advantages of this approach is that:
*) all mirrors from a geographical location can be used at the same time
*) user may/can select which mirrors within a specific region
(countries) to use
*) automatic checks for the downloaded files
More information about metalink, can be found on
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalink (for some reason, I don't know why
the primary website [www.metalinker.org] is not working).
PS: my metalink repository
(http://download.packages.ro/metalink/testing/debian/) already has some
metalinks for debian isos.
Nobody has replied to this suggestion. Actually, I would be interested
to know what people from Debian think. Perhaps they have a solution like
this in mind?
----
Ricardo,
I'm guessing it got lost among the replies. hopefully someone will
investigate further and report their unbiased findings.
metalink tries to improve availability, by listing all the locations
you can get a file, and guarantee integrity, by providing checksums
for automatic verification. it's used for downloads of OpenOffice.org,
openSUSE, cURL, and other distributions. this and other info is in
XML, so it's machine readable/processable and allows for much simpler
downloads. as mentioned, the geographical location of a mirror allows
downloads to be more efficient and avoid oceanic links if the download
clients make use of that information.
feel free to check out the wikipedia page or open a .metalink file up
in a text editor.
until support has been added to wget, aria2 (a metalink downloader) is
available on debian. there are also 10 other clients or so on Mac,
Unix, and Win, from download managers to FTP programs and p2p clients.
--
(( Anthony Bryan
)) Metalink [ http://www.metalinker.org ]
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