Mirror listings for distro should be a single table instead of one table per country

Guilherme's changes to the bug description caught me off guard because
it wasn't exactly what I had envisaged. I had still imagined the table
would look like this:

Argentina
www.foo.ar xxx yyy
www.bar.ar ttt zzz

Germany
www.net.de bbb zzz
www.bong.de aaa www

This, I think, looks cleaner since it does not repeat the country name
again and again. What I meant by "one full table" is that all of this
should be a single table, with a colspan="n" attribute on the country
field so that the country takes up a full row. The point of putting it
all in a single table is to have all the detail rows line up (the domain
names, the columns of data are all aligned nicely).

The disadvantage is that it is difficult to use the
click-header-to-sort-table trick on a table laid out like this, without
a LOT of extra JavaScript, which is out of bounds for this feature :-).
However, I don't actually think this table needs to have the
row-header-click-to-sort functionality. It should simply be sorted by
country first, then speed.

Mark

I've tried two different approaches:
1. The column headers repeated for each country
2. The column headers only at the top of the table

I, personally, think the second one looks better, since we don't seem to have too many mirrors for each country.

Question: do we actually need the column headers /at all/? I suspect you could just do a few changes to the content in the rows and get a better result. I think it should be more similar to the existing listing, to make sure that users will be familiar with how it works. Suggestions:

  - Make the main link for the mirror the actual URL to it, and perhaps use the URL as the link text -- the name is irrelevant, isn't it? This has the unfortunate problem of not working when there are multiple URLs for that mirror, but perhaps we can stack them in multiple rows or something.
  - Add a "details" link at the end of the row which takes you to the mirror's page. Nobody but the admin cares about it, so don't make it prominent.
  - Change "Unknown" to say "Unknown freshness" [*]
  - Perhaps say "2Mbps connection" or "2Mbps speed" instead of "2Mbps"

How does that sound?

[*] Well, not freshness. IIRC Mark had a good word to use in this situation, but I can't for the life of me remember what it was.

Yeah, that sounds pretty good. I'm attaching another screenshot now.

Note that, as we discussed, the link around the mirror's name will now point to the HTTP URL of that mirror, and for mirrors that also have ftp/rsync URLs, we'll display them in parenthesis right after the mirror. This may mislead people to think that a given mirror supports only ftp/rsync, though. Any suggestions?

I wasn't talking about column headers at all, sorry if that was unclear.
I was talking about the country name. The difference between:

   France archive.ubuntu.fr 1 week
   France archive.fr.ubuntu.com 1 day
   France mirror.seine.fr 1 week

   Germany archive.de.ubuntu.com 1 day

And:

   France:
   archive.ubuntu.fr 1 week
   archive.fr.ubuntu.com 1 day
   mirror.seine.fr 1 week

   Germany:
   archive.de.ubuntu.com 1 day

I find the latter option neater for long lists with many countries, but
it means you lose the ability to sort by anything other than a single
criteria.

Mark