PATCH: better progress reporting

[Martin Pool]

On 14 Mar 2002, Cameron Simpson <cs at zip.com.au> wrote:

> 	timeconfig-3.2.5-1.i386.rpm
> 	      158253 100%  160.48kB/s    0:00:00
> 	timidity++-2.10.4-2.i386.rpm
> 	     9309389 100%  397.71kB/s    0:00:22
> 	tix-8.2.0b1-67.i386.rpm
> 	      456809 100%  437.78kB/s    0:00:01
> 	tk-8.3.3-67.i386.rpm
> 	     1371196 100%  433.77kB/s    0:00:03

Good in concept.  The current output does look a bit dumb.

I'd like to take a broader look at our progress reporting.  Since we
have the whole file list, in theory we know not only about progress
through the current file, but also progress in the overall tree.
Perhaps something like the output from Debian's apt, if you know that.

I'm wondering about a --machine-readable option that produces status
output in a way that can be easily parsed by scripts or GUIs and that
allows room for extension without breaking existing scripts.  At the
moment I'm leaning toward an rfc822-like plain text format with tags
at the start of each line, and encouragement to parsers to ignore
lines they do not understand.

File-Begin: timeconfig-3.2.5-1.i386.rpm
File-Size: 158253 
Progress: 4000
Progress: 8000
...
File-Complete: timeconfig-3.2.5-1.i386.rpm

etcetera

I guess somebody is going to say "XML" at this point, but it does seem
more complex.

-- 
Martin