Poolng/redundancy in apt's sources.list?

[Joe Emenaker]

Okay, I'm stumped.   I used to go directly to ftp.debian.org for my packages. However, I started feeling guilty about hammering the central servers, so I started using mirrors.   The problem with that was that many of the mirrors would either be a few days out-of-sync with the central servers or some would be down. In general, there'd just be some problem that requred me altering my sources.list file every couple of weeks.   Then, I started putting multiple mirrors in my sources.list. This makes it more reliable when trying to install packages. However, when I try to Update the database through dselect, I almost always get some sites that can't be reached... causing "apt-get update" to return an error code, which causes dselect to decide to not rebuild the "available" file.   It's kind of a catch-22. The more entries in sources.list, the more distributed the load can be and the more chances I have of being able to get the package.... but it also increases the chance that the update operation will fail altogether if there's one site that can't be reached.   What I'd *love* is if there was some way to group a bunch of "deb ..." entries in sources.list together in a group that indicated "These are all redundant. If just ONE of these can be reached, that's good enough".   Does apt support this kind of thing yet?   - Joe