[tex-live] Rsync, a different question

[Robin Fairbairns]

George N. White III <gnwiii at gmail.com> wrote:

> In my experience, simply retrying the same site rarely works, so a better
> approach might be to use a list of different CTAN mirrors.  If they
> all fail then
> you have a serious network problem, so looping may not be much help.

there's a different problem with trying different sites, viz., mirror
consistency.

the ctan sites (cambridge, dante and tug) are within 15 minutes of each
other (unless actually broken).  however, the mirrors's consistency is
measured by our mirror monitor, and mirror.ctan.org will happily give
you something >24 hours old (i forget the exact cut-off).  using a
sequence of such mirrors was demonstrated very early in the life of
tl2008 to give incompatible results (not merely results with different
ages).

r