Hi Tim,
I would find another column for the wall clock absolute estimated
completion time useful as I often try to calculate this in my head.
I think I only care about the dots because they show that the download
is proceeding normally. Wget already outputs a message if it retries. If
there is a situation where the download is hanging but wget is not
restarting it then I think I would prefer a message instead of trying to
guess what is happening from dots not appearing. With sufficient
messages in place it would be possible to skip the dots entirely. Or
instead of dots output a brief message to give download status.
Whether there are dots or not, let the user select a time or per cent
complete interval for status updates. I typically pipe wget progress
output to a file. Usually I don't look at the output at all. In most
cases it would be sufficient if wget output an initial row after say 1%
complete and then I could signal wget if I want it to output another
progress line.
If wget must have dots then instead of mega and giga options, perhaps
let the user set the dot size and calibrate the left column units around
that. If wget allowed per cent complete or time intervals that would set
the dot size, although not likely to a round number.
Personally I'm fine with 32 dots per line. I find blocks of 8 easier to
read (which I usually don't) than blocks of 10. But if anyone cares and
has time to code it, perhaps an option to specify the dot cluster size
and clusters per line.
thanks,
Greg
On 2019-06-12 2:58 p.m., Tim Rühsen wrote:
Hi Greg,
looking at it when downloading a large file, I have to agree.
A dynamic multiplier on the left would be nice (K->M->G).
I added this as a comment to https://gitlab.com/gnuwget/wget2/issues/342.
Thanks for the feedback.
Regards, Tim
On 12.06.19 06:19, Greg Knittl wrote:
Hi,
--progress=dot:giga on wget 1.17.1 outputs 32 dots per line where each
dot represents 1MB downloaded.
The cumulative total at the left of each line is in KB. I would find MB
easier to understand. It matches up with the dots and better matches the
scale of GigaByte files. I still often have download speeds measured in
KB/sec but I don't recall ever comparing download speed to the
cumulative total on the the left.
I would ask that you at least consider this for wget2. I personally
don't have any programs that read this column of wget output so I would
be fine if it changes in the current wget1 but I would understand if you
consider it an API that you don't want to break.
thanks,
Greg
