Comment 6 for bug 14599

This is a combination of the following:

  * apt's default HTTP timeout is 120 seconds

  * apt tries each IP address for the archive in turn

  * apt tries all of dists/hoary/Release,
dists/hoary/main/binary-$ARCH/Packages.bz2,
dists/hoary/main/binary-$ARCH/Packages,
dists/hoary/restricted/binary-$ARCH/Packages.bz2,
dists/hoary/restricted/binary-$ARCH/Packages in succession, and doesn't remember
that it timed out on previous ones

When you multiply these together, and multiply by two again to take into account
the way we test both the primary repository and the security updates repository,
this comes to 40 minutes' worth of waiting around.

mvo, would it be possible to make apt a little more intelligent about this, and
at least remove the five successive timeouts in the third point above, please?
I'd hope that it should be reasonably straightforward to remember that the
request for Release timed out and not bother with the various Packages files.

In the meantime, I'll probably add some workaround like testing with wget before
running apt-get update.