The proper form is "does not" here.

This variable blocks the enable of online repositories and activates
the enable of RPMS.main repository in iso or rootfs.
The old name was misleading.

Default changed from yandex to alt due to:
https://bugzilla.altlinux.org/show_bug.cgi?id=41588#c1

This reverts commit 1b457a5d.
It wasn't prudent to switch everyone to master FTP server;
Yandex mirror still has an order of magnitude more bandwidth.

%_host_cpu was a wrong choice in the first place,
and the particular case of %_arch == ppc64le
with %_host_cpu == powerpc64le became the culprit.

Yandex mirror can lag behind at times:
http://mirmon.altlinux.org/sisyphus.html#ru

...and we've got 1GbE there now, not that bad
compared to 100Mbps back then...

NB: yandex traffic might be billed as "local"
    in many regions, this should be revisited.

...instead of (often-crowded) ftp.altlinux.org for updates.

Old format:
rpm [p7] http://ftp.altlinux.org/pub/distributions/ALTLinux/p7/branch x86_64 classic
New format:
rpm [p8] http://ftp.altlinux.org/pub/distributions/ALTLinux p8/branch/x86_64 classic

This is about (a)synchronous package builder in fact.

See http://www.opennet.ru/openforum/vsluhforumID3/86239.html#1
for a query that has led to this one; in particular,
- xdm dropped (won't log in root and there are no users yet);
- network is brought up and configured via DHCP by default;
- apt-get works out-of-box;
- default image size is twice the chroot size.