Feature request: config file

[rinchen]

Hi,

I've run into a situation where perhaps a configuration file for rate-mirrors would be helpful.

The current currency default is 8 and that works well for users on slower internet connections. For those on higher speed connections, a setting of 16 works much better.

Several Arch-based distributions use rate-mirrors as part of their update scripts. Some use the default concurrency setting and some override it.

It would be nice to have a configuration file to set the concurrency parameter in so that these tools can be extended to allow end-users to specify their internet speeds. These tools could then be extended to support the pacman.conf parallel option as well. Here is an example:

Slow:
concurrency = 4
parallel = 2

Default:
concurrency = 8
parallel = 5

Fast:
concurrency = 16
parallel = 10

What are your thoughts on adding this feature into rate-mirrors?

Thanks.

[westandskif]

Thank you, it's a good idea! I'll do it but probably won't get to it in the next 2-3 weeks.

[westandskif]

my bad - I've been a bit out of mana :) I hope to get down to it soon

[westandskif]

hi @rinchen
I reviewed what can be done without breaking the current approach, which is "bare binary with its baked-in defaults should work everywhere" (no configs are needed). There is a problem with building configuration hierarchy like this:

1. baked-in defaults
2. optional config file
3. CLI args (some of them are optional, some of them are not -- like subcommands).

Even though there are tools, which can simplify such config stacking, it would still require at least 2 copies of each config and a decent amount of copy-paste for each of 10 existing subcommands. I made a couple of attempts to approach it, but failed to come up with a nice way of doing it, that's why I changed the end goal.

As a simpler option, it may be less convenient though, I added environment variable support, so you can add export RATE_MIRRORS_CONCURRENCY=16 to your bashrc / zshrc file to pass this parameter unless the distro of your choice explicitly passes concurrency param (if so, CLI arg has the highest priority).

HOWEVER, along with the above, I changed rate-mirrors defaults so it now has concurrency=16 (better for fast connections), increased per-mirror timeouts (required for slow connections) and introduced upper limit for per-mirror download time (this speeds up tests if connection times are good).
Please, check out v0.16, it should become better at its "defaults should work for everyone".