Presently, I am waiting until the end of global warming to finish pulling down texlive packages. I see that there are a few servers from which packages are provided. Is the following feasible as a feature to improve effective download speed?
List the base information for what packages there are and where those packages are located. 1) For each package identifier, list the locations from which they may be obtained. List the top level status for each location so the first level of scheduling packages across servers. Something simple and sane. Prioritize uniquely pulling down packages and more specifically getting packages which are available from the fewest locations first so as to not bottleneck later on. 2) For each location, have a mapped value for a presently downloading a package It would be simpler to leave it at step 2 for downloading, but we can do better. If we're running into a situation where we have a package which can be sourced from multiple locations and those locations cannot be given unique packages (typically, more locations than packages) then downloading a package can be interleaved between multiple locations. 3) For each actively downloading package, list locations actively assigned to obtain data for the package alongside information to interleave data coming in from each location. If someone is willing to do a bit of mentoring, this might be a good project to work on. Any thoughts on this? Is this re-hashing old ground?
