Re: Bug#31539: apt: Wishlist: x/N status indicator during downloads

[servis@purdue.edu]

*- Jason Gunthorpe wrote about "Re: Bug#31539: apt: Wishlist: x/N status indicator during downloads"
> 
> On Wed, 6 Jan 1999 servis@purdue.edu wrote:
> 
>> To me having the number of packages would be informative if at 98% I
>> have 8/24 packages and still have say 30m of download left compared to
>> 98% with 21/24 and 4m left.  The first senario would quickly let me know
>> that there were a few large sized packages mixed in with a bunch of
>> small ones as compared to the second case were I would see that only a
>> few small packages are left.  
> 
> But why do you care? The size/number of packages does not really have an
> impact on the transfer time. 
> 
> Jason
> 

For the same reason that the package name that is currently being
downloaded and it's individual size is shown, it does not have any
impact on the time remaining but it lets the user know what is going on.

None of the information has any impact on the transfer time, it keeps
the user up to date on what is going on(this is a good thing).  From the
example of my original wishlist bug report

Get http://debian.midco.net slink/main wget [221k][19/24]                       
97% [wget 126660/221k 57%]                             2863b/s 3m50s

As an extreme the only truly useful information is the b/s rate and the
time remaining, i.e the output could be trimmed down to a single line
like:

2863b/s  3m50s

if all that is needed is information on the transfer time.  I don't
think this would be the right direction to go though.  Apt-get is a
very useful and much improved product, why not make it as user friendly
as possible?

Thanks,
-- 
Brian