FS#16277 - aif does not show pacman download progress/speed during install

Attached to Project: Release Engineering
Opened by Felix (thetrivialstuff) - Sunday, 20 September 2009, 04:44 GMT
Last edited by Gerardo Exequiel Pozzi (djgera) - Monday, 26 November 2012, 04:50 GMT
Task Type Bug Report
Category AIF
Status Closed
Assigned To No-one
Architecture All
Severity Medium
Priority Normal
Reported Version 2009.08
Due in Version Undecided
Due Date Undecided
Percent Complete 100%
Votes 7
Private No

Details

Description: aif does not show pacman's status during package download in either the current terminal or tty7. The packages show up as they are downloaded in /mnt/var/cache/pacman/pkg so one can get some sense of the speed by du -s'ing that directory repeatedly, but it would be nice if the speed were to show somewhere live.

Also, if the speed were visible and obviously too slow, aif does not provide a means to change mirrors and resume -- restarting aif from the beginning would blank all of the partitions, losing the packages downloaded so far.
This task depends upon

Closed by  Gerardo Exequiel Pozzi (djgera)
Monday, 26 November 2012, 04:50 GMT
Reason for closing:  Deferred
Comment by Matthew Gyurgyik (pyther) - Monday, 28 September 2009, 18:19 GMT
I want to bump this. It is nice to see how fast downloads are going so we can have some sense of when the downloads will be done. Unfortunately during the weekdays I only get 30-60KB and sometimes downloads stalls out. As Felix stated, there is no way to resume the download either. I think a warning should be issued if a user is stepping ahead, but it should not prevent them from entering that step.
Comment by Dieter Plaetinck (Dieter_be) - Wednesday, 11 November 2009, 12:09 GMT
patch welcome
Comment by Dieter Plaetinck (Dieter_be) - Sunday, 18 April 2010, 16:37 GMT
- you see the packages being downloaded by aif, so this is an indication of how fast it is going.
- if progress really stalls, then yes i guess aif hangs. you can kill pacman on another console and then go back in the menu to pick another mirror and resume.
but it would be better to have pacman timeout. feature request -> http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/19155
Comment by Dieter Plaetinck (Dieter_be) - Sunday, 18 April 2010, 17:18 GMT
- remove ip from eth0 while packages are being downloaded -> you get "no adress record" errors and you can take control again. however pacman does exit(1) and aif says everything was ok. but that's something else, see  FS#15854 
Comment by Xavier (shining) - Sunday, 18 April 2010, 17:51 GMT
What about checking mirrors with rankmirrors first ? Checking all of them could be too slow. But with a preselection of country, it would be awesome.
Actually you could completely ditch manual mirrors selection to just select a country. Then sort that country mirror list with rankmirrors.

In fact, this is what I have to do manually on each installation : keep only mirrors of my country, then run rankmirrors on that.
Comment by Matthew Gyurgyik (pyther) - Sunday, 18 April 2010, 17:59 GMT
Would it be possible to have pacman's output redirected to tty7 like all the other installation stuff is?
Comment by Dieter Plaetinck (Dieter_be) - Sunday, 18 April 2010, 18:28 GMT
let's keep this ticket for the issue at hand..
Comment by Xavier (shining) - Sunday, 18 April 2010, 21:50 GMT
Uhm ?
My suggestion would make the major concern of this bug MUCH less relevant, as you would already use the fastest possible mirror to start with.
It would also be a nice improvement for everyone.

It would also have avoided the biggest and most annoying problem I ever had with AIF : http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/17319
BIG FAIL simply because I chose a mirror that happened to be temporary down.
Comment by Matt (v01d) - Tuesday, 22 June 2010, 15:32 GMT
I cast my vote for this also. It is really important to see the progress of something that can take long time... In automated installations it is really useful to quickly look at the output of the installation to know if there was any problem installing packages. I think that requiring the user to fiddle looking for pacman output is really annoying.
Regarding patches, I don't have one at hand right now, but the last time I've looked through aif's source it seemed that it used a libui's function to execute a command with stdout redirection. Maybe it should be just a matter of changing that redirection to a tee call or something like that.
Comment by Dieter Plaetinck (Dieter_be) - Thursday, 09 December 2010, 10:49 GMT
dependency:
 FS#15369  - Pacman should timeout when mirror is not responding
Comment by Dieter Plaetinck (Dieter_be) - Tuesday, 17 January 2012, 10:23 GMT
this should be fixed, now that  FS#15369  is fixed. (it will show progress, and if the transfer stalls, pacman will timeout and aif will throw an error)
can anybody test this and confirm?

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