Recently, yum out of the box became able to choose the right mirror based on your net block or something. So we get our internal red hat mirror for fedora automatically, and it's pretty nice. By the same token, it would be neat if anaconda didn't ask for an install tree location on GA releases and instead just picked the right one. (and prehaps provided a way to override it)
Wouldn't it be as simple is prefilling the URL with http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/8/Fedora/i386/os ? That would give the easy way that automatically selects the right mirror, and the possibility to override it. I suggest raising the severity to med, because it should give a pretty significant gain for mirrors, if people used the network install instead of downloading the entire Fedora install DVD. The fix is probably a one-liner.
The problem is discovery -- we don't have (or really want to have) a lot of the bits for dealing with things like this in the first stage of the install. Some work is underway so that we can do repository selection in the second stage, though, for Fedora 9 and the idea is that we then can enable something like this.
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