[Distutils] Sourceforge mirrors, again

[Phillip J. Eby]

Well, it looks like Sourceforge has found yet another way to mess with 
easy_install's ability to download from their mirrors.  :(  Specifically, 
they are not keeping the dl.sourceforge.net "A" list up-to-date, so 
easy_install's attempts to just use simple round-robin DNS aren't always 
working.  Several IPs in the round robin "A" list are not responding, and 
some new mirrors haven't been added to it.  At this rate, the current 
approach will become unusable in a relatively short timeframe.  :(

It seems as though there is no way to auto-discover the mirrors themselves; 
I had hoped that perhaps a zone transfer on the dl.sourceforge.net zone 
might work to obtain a list of the actual mirrors, but I haven't been able 
to successfully obtain one.

What I'm wondering at this point is if perhaps the only sane thing to do is 
to publish our own mirror list via DNS, so that at least when there's a 
problem it can still be fixed.  The idea would be to replace easy_install's 
current DNS lookup of 'dl.sourceforge.net' IPs with something like 
'dl.sfmirrors.telecommunity.com' (for example).

Anybody have any thoughts on this?