Comment 9 for bug 913235

to be clear on this: the scanning will have no impact on the regular user. the user will never be provided an rsync URL by mirrorbrain - mirrorbrain will hand out the http-URL (or in case of a ftp-only mirror the ftp-URL).

scanning is used to check "Ah, this mirror has file path/to/X", so when a user requests mirrorbrain.mageia.org/path/to/X it can use that mirror as a possible target.

What andré suggest is a different downloading system, in my opinion once again "too smart"/not worth the effort.
rpm packages in general are small, so using download techniques that request the very same file from different mirrors is pointless/waste of resources. Better to run downloads of multiple different files in parallel.
In the same thought using rsync to get a set of files from a single mirror also is not really that much of an improvement (always assuming the use case of installing updates, what is what mirrors are mostly used for - the numbers of packages to update is not that big usually, except maybe after initial installation) - if your line is fat, I'd rather use parallel downloads from multiple mirrors.

But having written all that: This is out-of-scope of this issue. Changing the download-intelligence would be a separate step, independent of setting up mirrorbrain.