81144 - Installer should have only one progress meter

Status: VERIFIED WONTFIX

(SeaMonkey :: Installer, defect)

Description

[Matthew T (active 1999-2002)]

Build: 2001051504, Mac OS 9.1

To reproduce:
*   Carry out all the steps in the Mozilla installer.
*   Click the `Install' button.
*   Look at the following page.

What you see:
*   Two progress meters.

What you should see:
*   A single progress meter.

The purpose of a progress meter is to show overall progress of a task. In this 
case, the task is completing a particular Mozilla installation. The task is not 
installing a particular module; that is just a detail.

Most of the time, the second progress meter is indeterminate -- it is 
determinate for only very short time spans. Therefore, there's not much point 
including it. The user can tell that the installer hasn't hung by looking at 
the constantly-changing filenames, so the second progress meter isn't needed 
for that either.

Comment 1

[Sean Su]

I partly disagree.  I agree that we should have only one progress bar, but do 
not agree that it should be the second one.

And in order to have one overall progress bar, the backend libjar/zlib will need 
to be changed to return the total number of files in each archive.  I think 
there's already a bug on this part somewhere.

This is the same problem under the win32 installer.

Comment 2

[Samir Gehani]

Over to Syd for installer bug triage

Comment 3

[Michal 'hramrach' Suchanek]

In my opnion, the first progress bar is more important than the second (bottom)
progress bar. But in fact I would say nothing against a window with ten progress
bars if they actually showed something. 
The problem is that the top bar grows up to around 120% (thus the last 20%
showing just a full progress bar, and eventually showing asserts in console
window on Linux). I am usually doing a complete install if this makes a difference. 
I have no idea what the bottom bar shows but it suffers from the 120% problem in
0.9.6 Win32 install as well.
I think that the top progress bar should show how large portion of the
installation (in bytes) was already completed but the current behavior seems
just fine except for the 120% problem.
Unfortunately the installer progress window is something a user is going to see
as one of the first things (and possibly for quite some time) and threfore it
should behave like it is already finished and working :)

Comment 4

[Michal 'hramrach' Suchanek]

To sum up the previous long comment:

In some cases (Linux 0.9.5+ top installer progress bar, Win32 bottom progress bar)
the installer tries to perform around 120% of the installation which makes the
progress meter stop in before the installation is finished. 

Sorry for the long and almost unreadable post.

Comment 5

[[e-mail] (away - not reading bugmail)]

I talked to Sean about the issues blocking bug 168139 today. Dan caught the fact
that it might not be enough to use archive file counts for external installer
updates. I've heard from several people today that we should bite the bullet and
code up the libjar/zlib changes.

Marking this as a blocker for bug 168139.

Comment 6

[[e-mail] (away - not reading bugmail)]

taking this - that is, unless syd protests :-)

Comment 7

[[e-mail] (away - not reading bugmail)]

Attachment: functional patch

note: this makes the top progress bar work seamlessly and makes the bottom bar
superfluous. The patch doesn't actually remove the bottom progress bar.

Comment 8

[Sean Su]

this is not a requirement for GRE, but might be part of the fix for another GRE
problem.  I'll keep an eye on this.

Comment 9

[[e-mail] (away - not reading bugmail)]

I tweaked this quite a bit before I left and it seems to work quite nicely. I'll
try to get a link to a functional patch for evaluation purposes.

Comment 10

[Frankie]

Quoth Steve Dagley: "The Mac installer code was never Carbonized and there is no
intention to ever change that."

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=yahoo_com-77F6E8.09344011022003%40h-204-29-187-156.netscape.com
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=avkj4k%24ihs2%40ripley.netscape.com

Comment 11

[Grace Bush]

per comment above