[Distutils] Fwd: The state of PyPI

["Martin v. Löwis"]

> That's an extra HTTP request I need to make when I'm
> considering use of a mirror.  If the first mirror I check seems to
> be out of date, I may need to check all the mirrors.  It's an open
> question what should be considered potentially out of date, a
> timestamp older than an hour? a day?

15 minutes; if all mirrors are older than 15 minutes, it probably
means that the master is down, and you should then use the newest
mirror you can find.

> How old is too old?

More than 15 minutes.

>> get the list of mirrors  (-> the list of
>> mirrors and their timestamps get cached)
> 
> They'll only get cached for the program invocation.

No, you can also cache the fastest mirror across invocations,
and keep using it if it is younger than 15 minutes.

>> - pick the closest one
> 
> How do I decide what's closest? Did you mean closest?

He probably means the one that responds fastest.

> "etc" is just waving hands.  Selecting the right value is hard, possibly
> application dependent. Is this a configuration variable?  Now the
> user has something to deal with.

No, it will be 15 minutes. People might request being able to configure
it, but it won't really be necessary to do so.

Regards,
Martin