On Mon, Sep 03, 2018 at 08:13:55PM +0200, Karsten Merker wrote: > On Mon, Sep 03, 2018 at 04:41:10PM +0200, Julien Cristau wrote: > > Control: tag -1 + patch > > > > On 08/31/2018 06:27 PM, Julien Cristau wrote: > > > Package: choose-mirror > > > Severity: wishlist > > > X-Debbugs-Cc: tfh...@debian.org > > > > > > I think it's time for choose-mirror to stop asking by default. AFAIK > > > deb.debian.org works well enough now that we don't need users to > > > manually select a mirror close to them. > > > > > > PoC patch, completely untested: > > > > > Updated patch, at least somewhat tested. It downgrades the debconf > > priority for mirror/http/countries and mirror/http/mirrors so they're > > not asked by default (previous patch would still ask for a country). > > Only the "proxy" question remains; I'd kind of want to skip it by > > default unless we find out we can't get at the mirror directly, but > > that's something for another bug/patch. > > Hello, > > I can see the argument for not asking to select a mirror when > there is a well-working mechanism for automatically choosing a > "near" (in networking terms) mirror. Does deb.debian.org fulfill > everybody's needs in this regard? ISTR that there were some > discussions in the past that deb.debian.org didn't resolve to > particularly useful mirrors for some parts of the world, but I > have no idea whether that is still a problem. My personal > experience with deb.debian.org hasn't been that great - instead > of redirecting me to the Debian mirror that is run by my local > ISP (and that is in d-i's mirrorlist), it redirects me to an AWS > instance hosted rather "far" away in networking terms. > > Regarding hiding the proxy question: I'm not sure that it would > be a good decision to hide the proxy question by default. Being > able to connect to the mirror directly doesn't mean that one > doesn't want to use a proxy, in particular when a package-proxy > like apt-cacher-ng is available in the local network. > Personally, I would prefer if the proxy question remains > at default debconf priority.
I disagree with that, but I do also agree that it would be preferable if local proxies or mirrors were used preferably. However, this shouldn't be done by way of manual configuration; instead, I think it should be done by way of autodetection performed by apt, something not unlike the proxy-PAC scheme, where a browser looks for pac.<domain>, with the <domain> part being what was passed to it by DHCP, incrementally dropping off the leaf-most part of that until it resolves. I think such a scheme could work for apt too. -- Could you people please use IRC like normal people?!? -- Amaya Rodrigo Sastre, trying to quiet down the buzz in the DebConf 2008 Hacklab