Per Jessen wrote:
Philipp Thomas wrote:
On Sun, 14 Mar 2010 15:08:57 +0100 (CET), you wrote:
What use are progress bars for, when you can watch a cute verbose logging text? >:-) Many executives tend to find progress ars more pleasing though it beats me why.
Because they're most focused on the goal, less so on the process?
/Per
Very astute. Ideally I'd like both myself. Blow-by-blow of the regular text output AND something that estimated percent complete, ie progress bar or circle. I have occasionally written that into scripts in fact. For some big batch jobs I'll have a little step at the beginning that just counts all the things that the job is about to do, so that it can print a little progress thingy as part of it's output at every step showing percent-done. It's not just pretty. It's useful for estimating how long something will take before it's done. That can be really important some times. I may be able to think of several ways to handle some emergency, but often the best way takes the longest, and often I don't know for a one-off emergency measure how long it will take, but if I have it displaying percent complete along the way, I WILL know within a minute if it will take too long and I should abort it and do one of the other solutions instead. It's also good for regular non-emergency jobs, especially if they are big, so that when someone occasionally has to run it manually instead of from cron, it's less frustrating waiting for even a big 1/2 hour job if you can see or deduce a reasonable estimated finish time instead of just "I don't know it's been chugging for 10 minutes already, will it run forever? is it done in 2 more seconds..??? do I go to lunch and let this run? do I sit here and wait 5 minutes and get the result back to my boss an hour or a day earlier than if I left? Do I abort it and restart it before going home because it's tying up records and screwing up everyone else in the company until it's done???" Having some kind of clue for percent-complete is not just an anal pointy-haired-boss thing because they just like it because they're just like that. As for simply booting a box.. it really doesn't matter either way. I want to see boot messages only when diagnosing a problem or setting up a new box for the first time. The rest of the time I don't need 'em. Being able to hit a key to see them on-demand once in a while when needed is good enough. Conversely, they might as well display all the time because it's just booting. Over & done with in a few seconds even if you don't know what they mean and never read them. (And in my case, where all my opensuse boxes are servers, Either no one sees the box boot at all, or they are watching it via serial console where they want the text and it must be specifically non-graphical text) I allow my personal non-server boxes (couple netbooks/laptop/couple desktops), all ubuntu, to do their default graphical boots. The way ubuntu does it is actually the worst of both worlds. They hide the info of the text output from the rc scripts, but they don't even supply a progress bar in it's place. Instead it's just what they call a throbber, a looping animation. That is a busy-indicator, but not a progress or percent-complete indicator. -- bkw -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org