Comment 31 for bug 913235

oh, and I forgot: the redirect response not only contains the url to the mirror, but also contains metadata - just try a

curl -I http://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/stable/5.1.1/rpm/x86_64/LibreOffice_5.1.1_Linux_x86-64_rpm.tar.gz

not only get you the redirect to a matching mirror, you also get a list of alternative mirrors, in case the first one has a power outage or is down for maintenance or is not reachable for some random problem.
And also the hashes are included (base64 encoded)

and you can go fancy by selecting what type you want by using accept headers like e.g.

curl -H "Accept: application/metalink+xml" http://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/stable/5.1.1/rpm/x86_64/LibreOffice_5.1.1_Linux_x86-64_rpm.tar.gz

(will not redirect, but instead get you metalink xml - same as you'd get if you had requested file.metalink)