[darcs-devel] [issue1500] 406/445 looks like a progress indicator but isn't

Max Battcher me at worldmaker.net
Sun Jul 19 06:37:17 UTC 2009


Zooko wrote:
> New submission from Zooko <zooko at zooko.com>:
> 
> <warner> (one of the maddening things about darcs is that the "406/445"
> 	 messages, that look like they should be progress indicators,
> 	 aren't. In "A/B", the B keeps growing)				[10:48]

Interesting; but I've seen other tools follow a similar pattern where 
the "outer" estimate grows, and I for one have grown used to it. (For 
instance, debian's apt and related tools do it in a few places. Even 
fsck has a tendency to do it.) Something I find nice is that darcs 
doesn't bother giving an approximate (constantly changing) percentage 
mark for "unbounded" indicators. (Whereas well known indicators in a few 
places in darcs do provide percentages.)

I'm assuming that the hashed-storage file index will cut down on the 
number of progress messages of this sort as it gets better integrated...

Does warner have any suggestions for how this might be bettered from a 
UI standpoint?

I was just thinking that one simple UI change suggestion to implement 
would be to simply add a tilde prefix or plus suffix:

Fooing the bar (~406/445)...

or

Fooing the bar (406/445+)...

--
--Max Battcher--
http://worldmaker.net


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