Re: GTK frontend, global progressbas support proposed
On Tue, May 17, 2005 at 08:22:45AM +0200, Attilio Fiandrotti wrote:
> Some days ago colin watson suggested to introduce in the PROGRESS
> protocol the possibility to have more than one progressbar: "it would be
> interesting to have a global progress bar indicating the progress of the
> whole installation (roughly, your position in the main menu)."
> I strongly support colin's idea: a global progressbar could be very
> useful and could improve used friendlyness of the installer very much.
> For my thesis i've been asked to implement green/red checkmarks aside
> the main menu buttons to keep track of already configured steps : tought
> this can surely be done i think it would be better to introduce the
> global progress bar colin suggested.
As far as the cdebconf progress protocol goes, you have to be a little
careful to preserve backward compatibility. You'd need to add
<title-template> as an optional second argument to each of PROGRESS SET,
PROGRESS STEP, and PROGRESS INFO; then you can allow nested PROGRESS
START and PROGRESS STOP commands, and control each bar independently. I
think it would also be a good idea to add an optional <title-template>
argument to PROGRESS STOP, since a number of udebs have bugs where they
don't always tear down their progress bar in error cases, and you don't
want to end up stopping the wrong one.
One unresolved issue is that the main-menu progress bar should be
controlled by main-menu itself, not by cdebconf, which means that it
still needs to look good even if the frontend doesn't support multiple
progress bars. In practice this probably means that the main-menu
progress bar should be ignored by such frontends. I can't think of a
solution for this off the top of my head, although I haven't thought
about it for very long.
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@debian.org]
Reply to: