[merge] MVC progress bars, and indication of network traffic

[Jonathan Lange]

On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 8:18 PM, Andrew Bennetts
<andrew.bennetts at canonical.com> wrote:
> Martin Pool wrote:
> [...]
>>
>> I don't think the 'dots' bar is very useful, because we don't have any
>> good idea of the total amount of traffic and so you just get a screenful
>> of dots.  Maybe others find it so?  Also, I find I rarely have an
>> interactive session that can't repaint the screen.
>
> The 'dots' bar is potentially useful for automated scripts that determine if
> a process is still alive based on if it's still producing output on stdout.
> That's a bit of a niche use-case, and not necessarily something we need to
> support as a built-in.  But it does explain why 'dots' or something like it
> can be useful.
>

If you stop supporting it, you need to provide something else to
replace it -- we use it to reset timeouts when mirroring branches.

jlm