[Aptitude-devel] Plans for aptitude 0.5.0 - 0.6.0.

[Daniel Burrows]

On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 10:58:12PM +0530, shirish <shirishag75 at gmail.com> was heard to say:
> Hi all,
> Remember me talking about the best server bit. I just realized that
> even that implementation is half-done. What it actually does is just
> tries to do so latency tests and on the behalf of that it gives the
> user a server.
> 
> What would be really cool is if one could use server based on a
> combination of :-
> 
> a. Latency
> b. Freshness of the archive
> 
> This probably would make the whole thing a bit more complex but I as a
> user would perhaps look for
> 
> a. sacrificing a bit more latency
> b. For pretty fresh archives

  I'm not sure what "freshness" would mean, how to determine it, or how
you would automatically pick a server based on it once it was determined.
Presumably this feature would work by downloading the list of official
Debian servers from [somewhere], then pinging them all and picking the
best one. If a server is lagging significantly behind the daily pulse,
it should be dropped from the list of official mirrors.  I don't think
that aptitude can easily tell which servers are lagging; well, maybe if
you downloaded a Release file from each server and checked the date...

> Another point perhaps (going out on the leash here) what do you think
> of the metalinker stuff www.metalinker.org

  I don't know much about it.  From what you said it sounded a bit like
bittorrent, and I know there was a project to use bittorrent for apt
downloads (Cameron Dale was working on it, IIRC).  It looks like you can
install apt-transport-debtorrent in unstable now; I don't know how well
it works since I haven't tried it.

  Daniel