Package: apt-setup
Severity: normal
The progress bar hangs at eg, 50% for 20 minutes during an install over
dialup as the Packages files are downloaded. With debconf-apt-progress
it should be possible to include apt download progress info into the
progress bar.
Some things make this difficult to implement well. Each generator is run
and does not know what other generators have run or have yet to run, so
it seems that without adding a lot of extra info to a generator
invocation, a generator could only reasonably update the progress bar
with STEP. debconf-apt-progress uses SET exclusively.
It should be possible to add a --steps n switch to debconf-apt-progress
which would make it use relative positioning via STEP and alays
increment the progress faorward that many steps as apt is running.
But, all the apt calls are wrapped up inside of apt-setup-verify, which
can be run multiple times in one generator run too[1]. Or not be run at all
by a generator, and only be run afterwards. This is a problematic design
element of apt-setup for other reasons too, and it renders even using
relative stepping with debconf-apt-progress seemingly impossible.
One thing that would work would be to run apt-setup-progress, but only
let it update the INFO of the bar, and not step it at all. Then we
would at least get download estimates from apt, although the bar would
still update with the very low granularity it has now. Better than
nothing ..
(Another reason to use apt-setup-progress here eventually might be
multi-CD support.)
--
see shy jo
[1] For example, the mirror generator might run it once part way, fail
due to network trouble, then re-run it after the user selects a
different mirror, and then it will run once more after the genertor
exits.
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