The progress bar that doesn't convey any sense of progress (was Re: ...)

[Martin Pool]

2009/11/27 Andrew Cowie <andrew at operationaldynamics.com>:
> On Thu, 2009-11-26 at 11:51 +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
>> Tiny cheap suggestions: (1) If the progress bar is not going to move
>> during the download, just replace it with a simple spinner: (/).
>
> People have been asking for this for a while. For reasons I don't
> understand, the Bazaar team really like their progress bar. Not sure
> what good it does when all it really manages to convey is the impression
> that bzr is slow, or not doing anything, or wedged.
>
> The part I love is how the progress bar goes away for a moment, then
> resets to zero, then shows 50%, then still shows 50% about a minute
> later, then goes away again, then blasts from 0% to 100% really fast.
>
> Meanwhile there's all this really cool text stuff going on on the right
> hand 20 characters of the screen. Not really sure what it's saying,
> though; the progress bar is in the way.

Some of this will get better again when the uifactory changes come
back in; we cut out some progress reporting to avoid reported bugs.

What I typically see is

[#########/          ]   1071KB   182KB/s | Fetching
revisions:Inserting stream

I don't see where the "20 characters" thing comes from.

I don't think it's a good use of time to reiterate all the things that
could be improved in this, as opposed to just doing them.  I do know
of several.  I will try to land some soon and you can see if you like
it better.

The idea that we should show total_bytes/total_time rather than
instantaneous bytes/time is interesting to me.  I find it interesting
to see it change over time.

Maybe we should have an option (or just always) print the total data
and time at end end, like what -Dhpss does?

-- 
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>