The APT HTTP method and round-robin DNS

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Hi APT maintainers,

Jonathan Nieder wrote:

> As Eugene noticed, the use of round-robin DNS between out-of-sync
> mirrors, by ftp.us.debian.org for example, makes it hard to reliably
> fetch and verify the Debian archive's index files. Despite having
> similar addresses Release.gpg, Release, and Packages can end up being
> fetched from different mirrors. I suspect it is possible for this to
> come up in some proxy setups, too, where the client has no control
> over which mirror each file is fetched from.
>
> I suggested that one possible solution would be to force use of IP
> addresses for host names in requests made by the APT HTTP method. Of
> course this is not ideal, because among other things it breaks virtual
> hosts.

Ping?  Would you be interested in a patch for this?