fedup - the good and the bad

[Temlakos]

On 07/08/2013 07:03 AM, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> I've used fedup on 4 very different machines,
> and it has worked faultlessly.
>
> My only gripe is the complete silence
> during hours of processing.
> Is there any reason why something -
> if even just a dot every minute or so -
> should not appear on the screen?
>
> Of course an estimate of the expected duration
> would be even more helpful,
> or just a statement of how many packages have been processed,
> out of how many in total.
>

Whoever writes the wiki article on fedup, should post a range of 
estimated-times-for-upgrade for each step of the process, with a set of 
total numbers of upgradeable packages.

He should also remind everybody: be sure to install all things fedup 
before you begin! That includes the fedup-plymouth package. When I 
installed fedup, Apper didn't resolve that particular dependency. So I 
checked it by hand to make sure I had it.

The Plymouth display needs to reach all the way across the screen. A 
progress bar no longer than three centimeters can make people think the 
upgrade has hung, when it hasn't. Happily, I had the disk-access pilot 
light to tell me that something was going on. Then the Plymouth progress 
bar went from just one dot to two or three, then to a millimeter. That's 
how I knew to wait.

The first step (#fedup-clii --network 19 or $sudo fedup-cli --network 
19) at least echoes back a message with every package it downloads, and 
tells you how many are left. During the upgrade itself, you have to hit 
the Escape key to see that kind of display--and if you want to go back 
to the progress bar, it reads zero for the rest of the upgrade. (Maybe 
they'll fix that for 20.)

Now I ran a fedup session without error. But if the program had thrown 
an error, I'd have been out-of-luck. The community could use more 
information on how to recover from errors, and how not to throw them in 
the first place.

Temlakos