[R-sig-Debian] Help for sources.list

[Johannes Ranke]

Am Sonntag, 6. Juni 2010, um 21:38:26 schrieb Johannes Ranke:
> Ted,
> 
> I think you are not the only one that is annoyed by the need for
> translating the line
> 
> 	deb http://<my.favorite.cran.mirror>/bin/linux/debian lenny/
> 
> into something that works. However, this helps reducing the load on
> the main CRAN server in Vienna, and network load in general. I think this
> is worth the effort, except if the CRAN administrators would tell me
> otherwise. I copied them in in case they would like to comment on this.

Here is a comment from Friedrich Leisch, one of the CRAN admins, concerning 
the need for mirrors (he is not subscribed and can therefore not post 
directly):

"Yes, network load is exactly why we need CRAN mirrors. Sometime in the
beginning of the millenium when R started to really take off we
already had several CRAN mirrors, but did not "force" them on users by
statements like the above (or presenting the list of mirrors wherever
appropriate).

CRAN was then located at TU Vienna and I was tech admin. I got
repeated calls from our computing center wether the CRAN machine was
possibly cracked or had a virus, because it was consistently among the
top 3 machines of the whole university (with respect to bandwidth
volume), and at peak times "outperformed" the main university web
server including an in Austria rather popular FTP server with local
mirrors of open source software (like Debian). Softly "forcing" users
to use mirrors helped considerably to reduce bandwidth.

Now that was almost a decade ago, I don't want to know how much
traffic a single CRAN server would generate. Most mirrors are run by
university departments, it would be unfair if only one (or a few)
institutions hosting these would pay for all the traffic generated.

Of 

Best,
Fritz"