random thought of the day - a progress bar for tree transforms ?

[Robey Pointer]

On 14 Feb 2006, at 17:16, John A Meinel wrote:

> Robey Pointer wrote:
>>
>> This makes progress bar width-detection work again on posix (it was
>> always dropping to the default of 80 columns on my ibook) and renames
>> the "copy_to" bar to "copy" ("copy_to" is inscrutable to users,
>> including me).
>
> Should we use os.environ['COLUMNS'] preferentially to using your very
> odd construct?
>
> It seems like your method should override COLUMNS (thus come first).
> Since it seems like it would be more guaranteed to be correct if we  
> can
> get it.

I wasn't sure what the intent of $COLUMNS was in the source.  If the  
user has a very specific column size in mind and sets that manually,  
I guess we should use it in preference to any auto-detection.  OTOH,  
when I was trying to get it working, I noticed that $COLUMNS is set  
when you're in an interactive shell, but *not* from within a script,  
so it may just be that the original coder thought/hoped that $COLUMNS  
was a universal thing.

robey

PS. Don't blame me about the "very odd construct"!  It comes straight  
from the bowels of unix arcana. ;)  There ought to be a more pythonly  
way, but I couldn't find it.