On Mon, 30 May 2005 17:17:40 +0300
"Mike M. Volokhov" <mishka@apk.od.ua> wrote:

> Greetings!
> 
> [Excuse me please for cross-post, but this change is much more make-
> specific rather pkgsrc.]
> 
> All pkgsrc users have used some predefined list of distribution sites,
> known as MASTER_SITE_FOO. The problem is that list is hardcoded and
> thus very static, which results in the following caveats:
> 
> 1) The load on first site at list is dramatically huge, when second
> and especially rest mirrors often doesn't used at all.
> 
> 2) When very first sites is down, user should always wait many seconds
> before trying other sites at the list. This problem has been appeared
> recently with SourceForge.net mirrors.
> 
I'm not a pkgsrc guru, but I think for a particular build (or a bulk
build session) pkgsrc has to cache temporarily the list of sites that:
1) are down
2) do not contain the requested source files

otherwise when a package contains a list of many small source files,
pkgsrc will attemp to download each file from the same list of sites,
even when the first site is down or does not contain the files.