On Fri, May 25, 2007 at 09:51:36AM -0500, Les Mikesell enlightened us:
There is, use a baseurl in your config file rather than the mirrorlist.
But that's a per-box per-repo specific change, with per-distro, per-repo variations for the end users to figure out for themselves. And then it won't fail over at all if the url you pick goes away. Aren't computers supposed to work for you instead of the other way around?
You can't please everyone. I'd argue that the majority of people are not behind a proxy of any sort. I'm assuming you are using a transparent proxy such that you don't have to configure proxy settings on every box - so I won't argue that point.
Regardless, tools like puppet, or simply providing .repo files for folks makes it fairly painless to make those changes for end-users.
Yes, computers should work for you, however you can't expect the software to read your mind and do what you think it should do. Some amount of configuration is necessary on *any* computer - why is this different?
Matt