On Thu, Jun 17, 1999 at 02:35:11AM +0200, Martin J. Laubach wrote:
>   This has been on my wishlist for quite some time...
> 
>   The problem is that the MASTER_SITES list is in some arbitrary
> order, and very probably far from optimal in terms of using the
> topologically nearest mirror. For MASTER_SITE_{XCONTRIB,GNU,PERL_CPAN}
> etc. this can be set, but a more general approach seems appropriate.
> 
>   Rene and I have worked out a small addition to bsd.pkg.mk which
> allows for sorting the MASTER_SITES list according to some given
> preference, based on regular expressions.
> 
>   To define the sort order, define a list of regular expressions
> in order of decreasing preference, like this
> 
> 	MASTER_SORT= //.*\.at\.netbsd\.org/ //.*\.at/ //.*\.(de|ch)/
> 
>   and the MASTER_SITES list will be adjusted accordingly.
> 
>   Comments?

What about a step in installing pkgsrc (once, at the first un-tar,
or somesuch) that would test hops and/or throughput to the master
sites? It could then order those entries to give the user better
performance, and probably save net bandwidth too.

-- 
David Maxwell, david@vex.net|david@maxwell.net -->
All this stuff in twice the space would only look half as bad!
					      - me