[tlbuild] tlmgr repository list?

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2012-05-19 at 14:32:59 -0600, Nelson H. F. Beebe wrote:

 > I've just gone through a TeX Live 2011 install from DVD on a
 > newly-installed Windows 7 (64-bit) system.  I then ran the TeX Live
 > Manager GUI, and found that the tlmgr -> "Load other repository" menu
 > path has two problems: the typein box is far too short for a typical
 > entry, and there is no list of known TeX Live 2011 mirrors (we are one
 > of them).  The URL is long enough that I cannot remember it, so I have
 > to look it up in my scripts or logs, and then laboriously type it in.
 > 
 > So, for TeX Live 2012, is it feasible to populate the tlmgr repository
 > selection feature for Unix, Mac OS X, and Windows, with a list of
 > known repositories (and ideally, their city, state/province/region,
 > and country), so that (a) tedious typein is avoided, and (b) people
 > are more likely to choose a repository near them, instead of using the
 > default, which might lie more than a continent and ocean away?
 > 
 > For reference, here is our mirror URL and its location:
 > 
 > 	http://ctan.math.utah.edu/tex-archive/systems/texlive/tlnet
 > 	Salt Lake City, Utah, USA
 > 	Latitude-Longitude:	40 46 00 + / 111 50 55 -

Hi Nelson,
I don't think that it's possible to provide detailed information about
the exact location of a particular server.  All we have is the mirror
list on CTAN:

  http://ctan.org/tex-archive/CTAN.sites 

Some time ago I experimented with a menu based mirror selection scheme
and wrote a standalone Perl script based on CTAN.sites, just as a
proof of concept:

  http://tug.org/~kotucha/mirrsel

You still have to guess the city/state/province/region from the URL,
but I think that it's sufficient if you can select an arbitrary server
in a particular country at least.  In many cases the physical distance
to a server doesn't matter.  For Vietnamese, for instance, it doesn't
matter whether they download from Japan, Thailand, Australia, or
California, because the distance to the satellite is always the same.

Regards,
  Reinhard

-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Reinhard Kotucha                                      Phone: +49-511-3373112
Marschnerstr. 25
D-30167 Hannover                              mailto:reinhard.kotucha at web.de
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Microsoft isn't the answer. Microsoft is the question, and the answer is NO.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------