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

[Martin Pool]

2009/12/3 Gordon Tyler <gordon at doxxx.net>:
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> Gordon Tyler wrote:
>> Martin Pool wrote:
>>> I have one specific idea which I could do today, in between piloting:
>>> hide the progress bar and just show a spinner, plus the network
>>> indicators, plus the nerdy text.  The progress bar is not in practice
>>> a good indicator of overall progress until the code that feeds it is
>>> updated, so maybe it's better of hidden?  It sounds like people would
>>> generally prefer that.
>>
>> I actually have a branch where I was working on exactly that. I can
>> publish it if you're interested.
>
> lp:~doxxx/bzr/simple-progress-view

You should propose it for merge when you're happy with it.

I did a minimal change which just cuts out the current bar, leaving
only a spinner.  In brief testing, I kind of like it.  It will focus
more attention on the messages and the counts associated with them,
but perhaps that's a more tractable place to work, because they can be
improved one by one.

Anyhow that is available for review in
<https://code.edge.launchpad.net/~mbp/bzr/progress-old/+merge/15854>
and I would be interested in interactive test opinions too.

Gordon I see in that other branch you're scaling the rates to KB, GB,
etc.  I thought about this in the first cut and actually rejected it
(though I may be wrong) for a few reasons:

 * things tend to flap from 900kB to 1MB/s creating noise to little real benefit
 * in most cases both speed and size will not be phone-number-long
measured in KB
 * if you measure total transfer in GB, it will stay stuck at 1GB for
a long time
 * I don't know if it will actually show up but it may slightly slow
things to do fp math in here

What did you think of actually using average rates?


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