Re: [Usability] Real progress screen for file-roller (Gnome Archive Manager)

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Sun, 2006-09-10 at 15:32 -0400, Saad Shakhshir wrote:
> This is not the case.  At least not for .rar files.  I have just
> tested extraction of a large rar archive and the Gnome Archive Manager
> provides just the 'busy' dialog that I described earlier without a
> true progress bar.  From the command line doing a simple 'rar x
> test.rar' I was shown a percentage indicator while the contents of the
> archive were being extracted.  Screenshot below.
> 
> http://img127.imageshack.us/img127/3761/screenshotyakuakeqk8.png

That sort of thing is incredibly hard for File Roller
to parse and use.  That text is written directly to the
tty, rather than printed to stdout.  File Roller would
have to jump through some hoops to get that data, and
even then it would be very error-prone.

Command line front-ends pretty much suck by nature.
A well-written library for archive files would allow
us to have a much better program.

--
Shaun

> On 9/10/06, Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net> wrote:
>         On Fri, 2006-09-08 at 10:14 -0400, Saad Shakhshir wrote:
>         > It would be much more meaningful to the user to be able to
>         view the
>         > progress of file extraction instead of the simple 'busy'
>         dialog that
>         > pops up when using the Gnome Archive Manager.  I'm not sure
>         what the 
>         > application is called by default in gnome, but I use Ubuntu
>         and there
>         > it is called file-roller.  I'm attaching a link to a
>         screenshot of the
>         > current progress dialog, which is really not a progress
>         dialog but 
>         > just an indicator that the file is being extracted.  Since
>         file
>         > extraction is usually a CPU-intensive and (for large files)
>         time
>         > consuming process, it would be much more useful if this
>         dialog did
>         > indeed display a progress bar.
>         
>         This is mainly due to the lack of useful feedback from the
>         command-line
>         utilities file-roller uses to handle the decompression. I'm
>         sure that it
>         would have a proper progress dialogue, if it weren't for the 
>         short-comings of the command-line utilities.
>         
>         --
>         Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>
>         
> 
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