My new netselect-apt script

[Avery Pennarun <apenwarr@nit.ca>]

Hi,

Today I released a new version of netselect into unstable.  It adds a script
called netselect-apt, which downloads the mirror index (which was rather
hard to find, by the way; README.mirrors is in a really nasty, hard-to-parse
format and doesn't talk about HTTP):

	http://www.debian.org/mirror/mirrors_full
	
and then pulls out the relevant URLs, chooses the fastest "main" and
"non-us" URL using netselect, and writes a sources.list file.

The new version of netselect works much better with multi-ip hostnames (like
http.us.debian.org and ftp.au.debian.org) and fixes a number of strange bugs
that could cause incorrect results sometimes.  It's also more than twice as
fast as the old one in common situations.

The reasons I'm telling you this are:

  - someone can update the apt howto to include the new method, which is
     much easier than the old one;

  - we may want to merge this functionality into apt, put it in the initial
     system configuration, replace apt-conf, and so on.  I don't have time
     to work on that stuff specifically, but I can help with suggestions
     or by adding new features to netselect if any.  (Probably now there
     aren't any more netselect features needed...)
     
Anyway, try it out and let me know what you think.  Note that this is pretty
new stuff, and only a few people have tried it.  It may still have bugs. 

Have fun,

Avery