On Oct 31, 2007, at 12:29 AM, Martin Pool wrote:
...* Better progress reporting - the progress bar is pretty inaccurate when pushing and downloading branches. Without doing any detailed analysis, we've tended to find that it starts at about 40%, stays there for most of the download time, then skips to 100% pretty quickly. Also, it's hard to understand what's going on with the 1/4 message on the right hand side of the progress bar. I haven't delved into the bug list to see what is already there on this issue, but a simple and single progress bar with an accurate percentage would be helpful.So the reason this happens is that a typical operation like branch is composed of a few major phases, each of which can take time -- the main ones are copying revisions, copying file data, and building the working tree. The idea was that we'd show just one progress bar, divided up by phase, so the user can see the overall progress to the target, rather than thinking they're almost done only to have a new bar pop up. However some of the phases are faster than others so the bar progresses nonlinearly, and as you say things like 'merge phase 1/5' don't mean much to users. I'm coming to think it would be better just to display one bar for each top-level operation, and make sure there's a clear message. ...
The progress display could be more granular without resorting to multiple progress bars.
My initial suggestion for this was to show the top-level task (e.g. "Branching...", "Pulling...", or "Merging...") after the progress bar by default, diving down to the next lower layer of detail (e.g. "Copying files x/y" or "Building tree") if the higher layer had not changed in ~5 seconds. Layers lower than the top-level task would be shown in brackets, to indicate that the task being described by the text wasn't the same as the entire task being covered by the progress bar.
For example, if you were branching over a very slow connection and
[%%%%%%%%%%%%%% ] Branching...
had not changed in 5 seconds, it might dive into showing
[%%%%%%%%%%%%%% ] (Copying files 1/1342)
If even *that* didn't change in 5 seconds, it would dive down further:
[%%%%%%%%%%%%%% ] (Copied 15 KB/42 KB)
When that file finished copying, the meter might go back up to
[%%%%%%%%%%%%%% ] (Copying files 2/1342)
That way the progress text would never (except in pathological cases)
go for more than 5 seconds without changing.
Cheers -- Matthew Paul Thomas http://mpt.net.nz/
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