But if we have a select few mirrors, having this automatically work with the user's country will be hard. There is no data available whether a German mirror would be closer to me or a British one. Germany is closer geographically, but I may have a much better connection to Great Britain.
If we would be able to trust all mirrors then it would be much easier to make this thing "close mirror" friendly. But what if there will be no trusted mirrors in Hungary? How can some code detect which mirror has better connection the network I am connected to?
Geographic location, or closeness, isn't neseccarily related to Internet
'closeness'. Typically, the closer a server is to a backbone, that is a
major upstream provider, the closer that server is to all other servers. Trying to detect what country a server is in isn't as useful as knowing how
well connected the server is; what counts are hops, and after that it's the
bit pipe.
If a mirror is in the same country then me, that it is probably very fast, as AFAIK every country or region has it's own Internet Excange, where the local providers are interconnected to exchange local traffic. At least we have this :)
So having the php.net backbone some user's can get immediately to a close mirror (a mirror in their country) if such a mirror exists on the backbone. Other countries can only get a random mirror.
Note that I am just playing with the ideas to get this random stuff a bit more close to user expectations.
Goba