From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Clemens Koller <clemens.koller@anagramm.de>
Date: Fri, 07 Mar 2008 14:02:08 +0100
Subject: [U-Boot-Users] [PATCH] Add flash programming counter]
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Jerry Van Baren schrieb:
> Michael Schwingen wrote:
>> Wolfgang Denk wrote:
>>> Please let's stay terse. Printing a dot is a single character on  the
>>> console.  I dislike funny stuff which requires output of non-printing
>>> characters or (weven worse!) terminal specific escape sequences.
>>>   
>> Backspace or CR without LF should work on all terminals, no?
>>
>> No matter how it is implemented, I am strongly in favor of *some* kind 
>> of progress output.
>>
>> If it is possible to estimate how long the operation will take, this 
>> would be a big plus IMHO (which precludes the simple dots).

> Hi Michael, Stefan, Wolfgang,
> 
> I understand where you are coming from and like countdowns a lot when 
> driving the system from a terminal.
> 
> The dark side of countdowns with \r characters is if you capture it in a 
> log file.  It isn't impossibly bad, but you end up with a lot of crap in 
> your log file.
> 
> The dark side of dots, as you point out, is that you don't know how many 
> dots are suppose to print, at least the first couple of times you do it.
> 
> Here is a thought, what about printing a bar and then print the dots. 
> How sophisticated is our printf() formatting capabilities?  Hmmm.  How 
> about something like this (I think the?
> 

ACK from my side to Jerry's version. Maybe a quite long fixed length (~40 characters)
bar would also be reasonable and the dot-time scaled to fit the progress.

A progress bar needs IMO two informations:
- that it's still working... so a quite frequent output of something to keep me calm.
- how long it will take... so I know how much time I will have to get the next cup
of coffee to keep me tickin'.

Perfect (= close to overkill, I know) would be IMO an additional output like:

Programming Flash from 0xc0ldbeef to 0xc0ldcafe takes 112s.
.................                                       |

So, I don't need to estimate from the first dots how long it will take to
complete.

Regards,

Clemens