The quietness of preupgrade

[Tim]

On Fri, 2010-07-09 at 08:01 -0400, Robert Myers wrote:
> How about progress indicators that race up to 98 or 99% finished and
> stay there seemingly forever?

The ones that would really annoy me made their way up to 100%, and
stayed there for ages, when they hadn't reached 100%, but were at
99.9999.

Obviously, you can't make a progress report for an unknown quantity, but
is the upgrade process an unknown quantity?  Does it start up, fetch
information, then know it's going to download X bytes, or X files?  Can
it show that you've fetched X out of Y.  Likewise with the next step of
installing them (X packages installed out of a queue of Y, and the
amount of a particular package being installed, one by one).

If the ordinary install from local files routine can show a progress
indicator, why can't the pre-upgrade?

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

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