[vbox-dev] change progress callback percent to float?

[Klaus Espenlaub]

Huihong Luo wrote:
> That's correct observation, but I am proposing a very simple fix for the 
> 1st 1% to show up on progress bar, etc.

Seems I don't understand what exactly you want to improve. It sounds 
rather user-unfriendly to me to mis-inform the user by letting the 
progress bar reach 1% faster than it would if a linear scale is used. 
Additionally that would work directly against the code which tries to 
calculate a reasonable ETA value.

> If changing the arg to float, 
> then I can at aleast know how many bytes has transfered at the begining, 
> instead of 0. Another way is to send back the total bytes transfered, 
> instead of percentage

The change to double certainly sounds relatively easy, but it requires a 
bit of effort to adapt all places which use the progress notification 
logic. Besides that we'd need to verify that _all_ client language 
bindings for both (XP)COM and webservice flavors can correctly deal with 
floating point values.

The proposal to send the bytes transferred doesn't easily fit into a 
general purpose progress notification system, as the meaning of a value 
between 0 and e.g. UINT64_MAX is pretty meaningless to e.g. the GUI.

As long as I don't understand what real problem you're after I can only 
provide such background information. Don't get me wrong, I'm not 
opposing changes in this area.

Klaus

> --- On *Thu, 10/8/09, Klaus Espenlaub /<Klaus.Espenlaub at Sun.COM>/* wrote:
> 
> 
>     From: Klaus Espenlaub <Klaus.Espenlaub at Sun.COM>
>     Subject: Re: [vbox-dev] VDCopy() fix for VHD, change progress
>     callback percent to float?
>     To: "Huihong Luo" <huisinro at yahoo.com>
>     Cc: vbox-dev at virtualbox.org
>     Date: Thursday, October 8, 2009, 10:12 AM
> 
>     Huihong Luo wrote:
>      > a related issue, wonder if you like the idea of changing VDCopy
>     callbacks to float/double percentage? right now, it's an int, the
>     1st 1% may takes more than 3 mins, not user friendly to update the
>     progress bar
> 
>     The progress bar _is_ linear with the offset in the target image.
>     The non-linearity you might observe is most likely a side-effect of
>     dynamic images. Reading/writing them is extremely fast if there is
>     just zeroes in a certain area. Any good ideas how to address this in
>     an image format independent way would be highly appreciated.
> 
>     Klaus
> 


-- 
Dr. Klaus Espenlaub
Sun Microsystems GmbH
Werkstrasse 24
71384 Weinstadt
Germany

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