Bug#201191: partconf: mkfs should indicate progress

[Gaudenz Steinlin <gaudenz@soziologie.ch>]

Am Die, den 11.11.2003 schrieb Steinar H. Gunderson um 04:02:
> A quick test indicates that most interesting mkfs-variations (ext2, ext3,
> reiserfs; vfat and jfs are so quick it doesn't need progress, and xfs seems
> only a bit slower than that) has at least some kind of progress output, so we
> _could_ theoretically grok that. It will be ugly, though...
This depends on the size of the filesystem and if dma is enabled or not.
enabling DMA speeds up filesystem creation a lot on big disks. With DMA
disabled it can take several minutes to create a big filesystem.

I suggest a simple solution. I think the most important thing is that
users don't see a blue screen for several seconds like it's now, but a
progress bar. I would only step it forward after one filesystem is
created, so we don't have to parse mkfs.* output. A setup with only one
root partition and one swap would have two steps:
0% creating filesystem on /dev/...
50% creating swap on /dev/...
100% finished
> 
> libparted1.6 supports ext2, ext3, vfat and reiserfs, but no jfs or xfs. One
> _could_ use libparted for the first four and fall back to mkfs.* for
> everything else; that would be a definitive improvement for 95% of our users
> (as I said, jfs and xfs seem fast already). More code that could go wrong,
> though...
I think one point of having partitioner is, that it does not use
libparted for filesystem creation and is therefore more versatile and
less prone to errors.
> 
> This should really be fixed for beta 2. :-)
ACK.

gaudenz