All entries for Wednesday 31 October 2007

Nicer YaST progress reporting.

I was prompted by a bug report to look at the progress reporting employed by YaST whenever the package management is used. At present separate popup windows are used to indicate progress/activity for reading each repository cache, and any downloads etc.

This makes the UI look rather busy & distracting. It also can cause problems for people using some window managers which fail at stopping the progress dialogues from stealing focus. This behaviour is one of the most frequent complaints now.

Additionally there is no global progress indication, which means people have no real idea how long the operation will take to complete. And for people on dialup it could be fairly slow.

I had a poke to see how difficult it would be to embed the progress reporting into the main window, and show global progress. It turned out to be relatively easy.

• Little video
• Screenshot (Qt)
• Screenshot (ncurses)

I’ll upload the source when I’ve refined the design a bit and make it work alongside the existing progress callbacks to avoid breaking everything else currently using them.

: 31 Oct 2007 23:48 |  Tags: Opensuse Yast |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem