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Re: progress bar


From: Ted Zlatanov
Subject: Re: progress bar
Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2008 11:18:57 -0500
User-agent: Gnus/5.110011 (No Gnus v0.11) Emacs/23.0.60 (gnu/linux)

On Wed, 10 Sep 2008 09:21:39 +0530 kalyan <address@hidden> wrote: 

k> I have been looking for a way to show to the user the status of the
k> compilation (like 40% complete) in my build system.
k> I know its tricky (
k> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-make/2006-09/msg00026.html) but has
k> anyone made a progress on the lines of "make -n" or something else?

Do the users need to see the actual percentage, or just that progress is
made?  Most often, the latter is the case, and you can fake things with
a "Zeno's arrow" progress bar that goes to 50%, 75%, etc. (half the
remainder each time).  Users don't like that exact behavior (there was a
usability study on the topic that actually looked at the progress
patterns that users like) so you may want to weigh things at the
beginning so progress starts slow, speeds up in the middle, then slows
again.  You can use make -n to gauge the total number of steps, but if
it's not important to be exact then you will be OK.

Ted





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