Mirrors by response time very unclearly worded

Feedback Feature Request
1

I’m working my way through the manjaro-architect installer again, and again I’m struggling to understand how to configure mirrors.

(for some reason the very first time I didn’t do that and it chose the mirror furthest away from me, so I know it’s important to configure it manually…)

When the script pings all mirrors to get the response time, it should more clearly say “response time in ms”, and when the GUI opens to let you choose mirrors, that should be more clear about what the value means (how long ago it was the mirror synced against the master repo).

In fact, I’d love it if I could sort via response time in the GUI.

#humblesuggestion

2

No pinging is done. Read the doc

man pacman-mirrors

given the limited space in a terminal the amount of information is limited to necessary information. Seconds is the only time value which can be separated into milliseconds which makes the 1.123 message self explanatory 1 second and 123 milliseconds.

This is the default display mode when the GUI open - sorted by response time.

3

Thanks. I’m just trying to feed back on how things look to a newcomer.

That would have been great to know. So when the GUI says “Check mirrors for your personal list, why not include that info at the top?”

More generally, it would save a lot of time if it was possible to sidestep checking the response time of dozens of servers, and choose a geographical region.

All this is not super urgent, or mission-critical, but would be nice in terms of keeping things user-friendly and accessible.

4

Because as stated in the man page

MIRROR RANKING
       The mirrors are ranked by means of downloading a file from the  systems
       core  repo.   The file defaults to core.db.tar.gz but can be customized
       using the corresponding entry in the configuration file.

or

       -f, --fasttrack [NUMBER]
              Generates a random  mirrorlist  for  the  users
              current  selected  branch, mirrors are randomly
              selected from the users  current  mirror  pool,
              either  a  custom pool or the default pool, the
              randomly selected mirrors are ranked  by  their
              current  access  time.   The  higher number the
              higher possibility of a fast mirror.  If a num‐
              ber  is given the resulting mirrorlist contains
              that number of servers.

And you can keep on rambling on how you would like it displayed or accept the fact - the whole idea behind pacman-mirrors - that any default ranking is by access time - what you do afterwards is up to you.

5

Just rereading your response

Again - read the man page - pacman-mirrors takes a lot of configuration options e.g.

pacman-mirrors --continent

or

pacman-mirrors --geoip

you can even limit by countries either by name or by iso-code

pacman-mirrors -c dk Germany austria

All of the above will create a custom mirror pool which will be used on subsequent runs e.g. by the pamac mirrorlist timer.

So you really need to read to docs.Everyting is explained either in the docs or more detailed by reading the source code available in the master branch.

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