Menu
▾
▴
#1906 mingw-get: select a mirror for downloading
closed
None
Feature
rejected
Unknown
False
2022-01-29
2011-10-07
Anonymous
No
The mingw-get and especially, mingw-get-inst, should allow users to select their
desired mirrors for downloading. This is very useful when:
- The default mirror doesnt work, or
- The default connection is slow.
I see that both Cygwin setup.exe and the TDM-GCC installer are very good at
supporting this.
The SF service is the provider of mirror selections. They give you the ability to select a default mirror for your account. Open your SF account in IE before using mingw-get to have the chosen default used for the download.
So this feature should be to have mingw-get ask for the SF credentials and attempt to login to the SF service. Since the list of mirrors is dynamic at the time of the request it isn't really prudent for you to choose one.
As for Cygwin they control they're own mirrors and do not use SF. As for TDM I'm not sure what he is using but it doesn't matter because it isn't mingw-get.
I'll leave it to Keith to decide to close or not.
I'm not convinced that logging into SF in IE has any effect on the mirror selection for mingw-get. If not, then this is anything but trivial.
With SF URLs, it may be possible to affect the mirror choice by appending something like "&use_mirror=<your_favourite_here>" to the URL, as currently specified; (see https://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/sourceforge/ticket/20499\). Note that this DOESN'T work for URLs specified in the IE or Firefox address bar, but it does appear to work for me, for download requests with wget.
However, I do have two concerns about this concept:
1) It isn't generic; while it might be possible for exclusively SF URLs, how do I extend it to work with foreign repositories?
2) Even if can be proven to work for mingw-get, how should the case when your choice of mirror is pulled from rotation be handled? It seems generally better to let the automatic choice proceed as intended; this may yield a slow connection, but at least it should always select a mirror which does actually host the file you are seeking.
I won't rule this out entirely, but I'm not attaching a high priority. Before I even consider it further, I will require proof of concept testing by an interested user, (by editing the package catalogues in $APPROOT/var/lib/mingw-get/data/*.xml, to add the appropriate "&use_mirror=..." qualifier to the "download-host" templates, and demonstrating that this does, in fact, deliver a tangible benefit).
Ticket moved from /p/mingw/feature-requests/98/
Closing as "rejected". Web technologies have moved on, and I don't believe that there is any viable way to implement this, or any benefit to be gained.