installation fails

[Michael Schwendt]

On Sun, 29 Jul 2012 23:38:06 +0930, Tim wrote:

> On Sun, 2012-07-29 at 12:59 +0200, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> > The progress bar calculation would need to become very elegant,
> > however, to not be degraded to Windows style installers, where it
> > jumps back to 0%, then moves to 100% again, only to restart from 0% an
> > unknown number of times. That may be good as a sign of life, but it's
> > not really helpful as a progress status update.
> 
> Why has this become so bad? 

An Anaconda developer might be able to answer it.

The most basic progress bar implementation (0% => no packages installed
yet, 100% => all selected packages installed) is a rough approximation of
how much of the installation is done. Now add further steps to the
installation process, such as the "performing post-install configuration"
which modifies the installed system. How much of the 100% does that
account for? Perhaps 1% if it doesn't take much time. And what about
packages' post-install scripts? If installation of a special package takes
as much time as installing a hundred other packages, how to make that
clear in the progress bar? One could try to come up with a formula for an
approximation of an ETA value, but how accurate do you think that would
get?

Probably more important to the user is some sort of spinner, a sign of
life, indicating that the installer is still working on something.

> I've installed Linux since around the Red
> Hat 5 days, and the install process was always rather clear.  You had a
> slow 0 to 100% of queued packages progress bar slowly advancing above a
> percentage of the progress of current package being installed.

Old Anaconda releases have displayed an ETA value instead, the "Remaining
time", approximated of course (but it has not been an accurate
approximation for many target machines, likely because the package
post-install scripts already had a large influence on the actual
installation time).

-- 
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