Package: cdebconf
Severity: normal
Severity: wishlist
Tags: d-i
This concerns cdebconf as used in d-i, with the newt frontend, and maybe
not in general.
Some poor souls may want to use d-i on computers that are no faster than
a 486. Since I use it in bochs a lot, I am in this category. One thing
that I've noticed is that tiny little delays in d-i that do not merit a
progress bar[1] can still take five or ten seconds on a slow machine.
During this time you see a blue screen, with a white line at the bottom.
It would be much more reassuring to see a little dialog box in the
middle of the screen reading "Working, please wait." This could be put
up by cdebconf as soon as it finishes displaying a given
question/progress bar, and left up until it starts to display the next
one.
If the title of this dialog is the regular debconf title, then it will
even be applicable in longer delays that cannot usefully have a progress
bar. These include eg, the wait for dhcp and the wait when rebooting.
I actually added a progress bar to both of these, as it is better than
seeing the aforementioned blank screen for several seconds to several
minutes, but it just goes from 0% to 100%.
(Best of all would be if there were a default "Working, please wait", and
also a way to display a different wait message, like "Running DHCP may
take a few minutes. Please wait." But I'd be very happy to settle for
just the simple dialog as originally described above.)
[1] One such delay involves collectiong information that will be used
*for* a progress bar! This takes 10 seconds in bochs..
-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
Architecture: i386
Kernel: Linux dragon 2.4.22 #1 Sun Oct 12 15:11:10 EDT 2003 i686
Locale: LANG=en_US, LC_CTYPE=en_US
--
see shy jo
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