Download GNU packages from mirrors (Part 2)

[adamjstewart]

This is a continuation of #8992.

I wasn't able to download diffutils from the previous URL. Switching to a mirror resolved the problem.

Successfully downloaded all 4 packages, and the checksums still match.

[citibeth]

How do we know the mirror won't stop working someday and we need to switch back to the original URL? (Oh I see... because that's what GNU recommends).

Is there any appetite for providing Spack with multiple alternate URLs for downloading, in case the first doesn't work?

[s-sajid-ali]

Could this be merged soon, I'm hitting the same error :

==> Installing diffutils
==> Searching for binary cache of diffutils
==> No binary for diffutils found: installing from source
==> Warning: A dependency has updated CPATH, this may lead pkg-config to assume that the package is part of the system includes and omit it when invoked with '--cflags'.
curl: (35) TCP connection reset by peer
==> Fetching https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/diffutils/diffutils-3.7.tar.xz
==> Fetching from https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/diffutils/diffutils-3.7.tar.xz failed.
==> Error: FetchError: All fetchers failed for diffutils-3.7-4jutnm74ba4d427rtzoelzqgu5vbqabr

/blues/gpfs/home/sajid/packages/spack/lib/spack/spack/package.py:961, in do_fetch:
        958                raise FetchError("Will not fetch %s" %
        959                                 self.spec.format('$_$@'), ck_msg)
        960
  >>    961        self.stage.create()
        962        self.stage.fetch(mirror_only)
        963        self._fetch_time = time.time() - start_time
        964