I've looked at this from time to time. Each time I look I bounce.
There are simply too many unknowns to get a good time estimate. You
can get a "percent of the total number of packages installed." Beyond
that you need to develop heuristics for the disk speed, the likely
time to install an rpm of a given size, and so forth. Disk speed is
fairly easy to nail down. Actual place a file on disk time may vary
somewhat with the number of files in the destination location. The
time to place an RPM on the disk is highly variable. It varies by
the amount of data that needs to be transferred to disk, the number
of files, and the amount of post copy prep that needs to be done.
These may vary depending on what other packages are installed. The
"Microsoft Minute" phenomenon is something that it's quite difficult
to overcome. (Although Microsoft seems to carry it to an extreme of
time estimating silliness. What would anyone expect? They cannot
improve it because too many users would have coronaries if Microsoft
actually made it accurate. The users would think the world had come
to an end. {^_-})
So it's probably easiest to go with percentage of the number of
files to be installed and a very rude and crude time estimate.
That way there's more time for the serious developers to work on
serious problems. (Er like, let's get a GOOD 2.4 someday.)
{^_-}
----- Original Message -----
From: "Tino Meinen" <a.t.meinen@xxxxxxxxx>
> Glad you mentioned this.
> I've had a plan to write about this as well for a long time.
>
> The proper forum for the Red Hat install would probably be the
> anaconda-list however.
>
> But I see these kind of inaccurate guesses in other places as well.
> Making an estimate for a progressbar or 'total-time', is a very common
> thing to do for a program(mer), so I wonder if there is a generic
> library available somewhere where these type of things are handled in a
> more scientific manner.
>
> Tino Meinen
>
> > When installing Shrike (and all prior versions, for that matter), the
> > estimated total time is grossly inaccurate. On a 1GHz P-III/M laptop
with
> > 512M, an "everything" install starts out at under 2 hours, then proceeds
> > to grow steadily to over 5 hours.
>
>
>
> --
> Shrike-list mailing list
> Shrike-list@xxxxxxxxxx
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/shrike-list
--
Shrike-list mailing list
Shrike-list@xxxxxxxxxx
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/shrike-list
