These are used to signal the start of the document in a stream of many
documents. As Ansible only supports one YAML document per file this is
unnecessary. About a third of our YAML documents already lacked these.
We had a GeoIP mirror in the past based on nginx and its GeoIP module,
but it didn't perform very well, due to the high latency (asking a
central server for the package and then redirected to the closest
mirror).
One of the reasons for offering this service, is so we can relieve
mirror.pkgbuild.com which is burning a ton of traffic (50TB/month),
likely due to it being the default mirror in our Docker image. Another
reason is so we can offer a link to our arch-boxes images in libosinfo
(used by gnome-boxes, virt-install and virt-manager), with good enough
performance for most users.
This time we take a different approach and use a DNS based solution,
which means the latency penalty is only paid once (the first DNS
request). The downside is that the mirrors must have a valid certificate
for the same domain name, which makes using third-party mirrors a
challenge. So for now, we are just using the sponsored mirorrs
controlled by the DevOps team.
Fix #101
