On 2021-11-04 14:35, Kenneth Wimer wrote:
I think that the real use-cases are:
1) to know that the installer is still doing something and not dead.
Right. And you can only find that out if something is moving; if it's ONLY a progress bar for the overall progress, you won't see much movement, especially if you have such pathological cases like long actions performed in some post-install script: Generating fonts, building a kernel module, downloading files from a very busy server (case in point: fetching MS true type fonts).
2) to know how far along the installer is, and how much is left
Right.
Maybe showing a percentage and the current main steps (as Imo suggest above) would be better?
That will of course always be done in parallel.
The real problem is that we cannot guess how long the whole thing takes.
Exactly; and a parallel installation will make that much worse since many things (downloads, installing packages) will be done in parallel, so that overall progress will be very rough; we can basically only rely on how many packages (out of how many) are completely installed (which includes the download, of course) yet.
Currently we are providing every possible detail to somehow fill that gap and I don’t think it’s making anything better, but rather worse.
No, we are not providing every possible detail; we are giving a pretty coarse overview: We only display what package is being installed right now, and the history of previous packages is scrolling by. But that latter part is mostly to keep the user entertained; and to give him a chance to read the last few entries if the message is replaced too quickly with a new one. Kind regards -- Stefan Hundhammer <shundhammer@suse.de> YaST Developer SUSE Software Solutions Germany GmbH GF: Ivo Totev; HRB 36809, AG Nürnberg