Helix GNOME 1.2 Nits

[Warren Young <tangent cyberport com>]

I have some minor nits to pick with the Helix GNOME 1.2 installer.  Fix
these, and we'll have something truly excellent, instead of merely
"pretty darn good".

1. The progress bars are calibrated in "packages to go" instead of
"megabytes to go".  Thus, the 8 MB gimp-1.22 package advances the
progress bar just as much as the 3 KB gnome-pim-devel package.  This
applies to both the download and to the installation process.

2. There's no way with the UI to tell it to save the downloaded packages
in a particular directory.  There're two reasons this is a problem: a)
some people don't have 100 MB free in /tmp; and b) some people like to
save a copy of downloaded RPMs for distribution to other machines at
that site.  I fit into the latter category, and I spent a bunch of time
finding out that the installer downloads the packages to
/tmp/helix-install and that it deletes them after you press the last OK
button.  Corrolary: it should be possible to ask the installer not to
delete the packages after it installs them.

3. I did two Helix GNOME 1.2 upgrades, each at different sites.  My
Internet link went down several times at one site, and the installer
resumed correctly each time.  (It has a satellite Internet connection.) 
Good job on that.  At home, my modem dropped once during the install,
causing the installer to lock up.  I don't think it locked up the main
loop, but that it was forever sitting waiting for more data to come in:
the kernel didn't tell it that the link had gone down or something. 
This could be fixed with an algorithm like wget's where it restarts the
transfer if a minute or two goes by without any data coming in.

4. It would be nice if the installer calculated an estimated download
time and recent data rates.  Up front it gives estimates for a 56K
modem, which is okay, but it didn't help me at work with my satellite
connection.  Plus, 56K modem estimates are nearly worthless, since
there's such a wide range of likely data rates.  (33.6 Kbit/s to 52
Kbit/s or so.)  It's better to calculate actual data rates and project
download times from that.

Bonus nit:  Can the installer resume partial transfers like wget?  It'd
be a nice feature...
-- 
= Warren -- ICBM Address: 36.8274040 N, 108.0204086 W, alt. 1714m