On 9/12/24 5:56 PM, bent fender wrote:
- starting with the biggest downloads, psychologically therapeutic
- showing the total done so far
- showing the total time remaing
Ummm...., This slices the differences pretty thin. Zypper shows pkg/total instead of bytes/total, but otherwise the information is pretty similar. The biggest difference is that pacman (configurable) will start 5 package downloads in parallel (default). While I haven't had issues with Arch mirrors to the same extent I have with the US openSUSE mirrors (or lack thereof - some repos are .de only), the parallel download may help with the slow mirror issue. What I see with Tumbleweed updates is sometimes download speeds are okay, other times (like last night) the download struggles between 0KiB/s and 100KiB/s causing some relatively small packages to take tens of minutes to download. This renders the time remaining number meaningless. When mirrors slow down, the time remaining grows wildly, when they speed back up, the reverse occurs. That doesn't mean total remaining time shouldn't be shown, that just means it is rarely very accurate at any given moment in time. Of course you can come up with a better time remaining based on average download speed over the course of the update, or some moving-average or sliding-window -- but -- if the download speed changes significantly (like when you get to openSUSE packman packages), even the average goes out the window. The one observation I would add to your list is that the zypper output is quite busy looking compared to Arch, and the resulting 2-line per-package output of zypper makes things scroll quickly when a bunch of small packages are downloaded. It may benefit zypper to remove, instead of adding, to the output :) -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.