Comment 30 for bug 913235

(In reply to Neal Gompa from comment #26)
> We also probably want to have an automatic redirector like Fedora's
> download.fedoraproject.org site, which automatically redirects to the best
> mirror that can provide a given directory/file.

mirrorbrain does that already. by geolocation and by optional giving custom weight to mirrors/limiting mirrors to only serve a specific region or network-block/ASN.

> This redirector applies to anything replicated out to mirrors,

No, it applies to anything, whether mirrored or not. just add something to the URL and you will still be redirected. This is difference to mirrorbrain. Mirrorbrain only redirects to mirrors known to have the file, and doesn't redirect on directory listing.

> For example, https://download.mageia.org/mageia/distrib/cauldron/x86_64/
> could be in /etc/urpmi/mediacfg.d/Devel-6-x86_64/url,

Same when mirrobrain is used.

if urpmi knows to follow redirects, then there's no difference.

I'd prefer being able to browse the representative/official directory listing on download.mageia.org and only be redirected for actual downloads, than being instantaneously redirected to a mirror where I cannot tell whether it is up-to-date/when it synced last/whether it has all files.

In this regard mirrorbrain is "superior", as you have one definite filelisting that represents the state of the repository, no matter whether all mirrors did sync already or not. If a mirror doesn't carry the requested file, you won't be redirected to it. This solves the "repository-info updated, but rpms not synced yet problems", and any other random sync failures that mirrors encounter.

see e.g. http://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/stable/5.1.1/rpm/x86_64/LibreOffice_5.1.1_Linux_x86-64_rpm.tar.gz (TDF uses mirrorbrain) - that url redirects to a specific mirror, but still allows you to browse http://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/stable/5.1.1/rpm/x86_64/
If you want to manually pick a mirror, you use the "Details" link in the listing, or just append ".mirrorlist" to the file's URL:
http://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/stable/5.1.1/rpm/x86_64/LibreOffice_5.1.1_Linux_x86-64_rpm.tar.gz.mirrorlist
→ that will not only show various hashes (that you could also request by e.g. appending .sha256 for the sha256sum: http://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/stable/5.1.1/rpm/x86_64/LibreOffice_5.1.1_Linux_x86-64_rpm.tar.gz.sha256 ), links to torrents (if enabled, TDF also runs a tracker, torrents have some mirrors as webseeds, so even if tracker is down or there are no seeds BitTorrent clients can download - and as you might have guessed, if you append .torrent to the file url, you get the torrentfile)
It shows (a selection of) suitable mirrors (as determined by your request's geoIP data) you can pick from.