pv (a pipeline progress indicator) in main?

[Dimitri John Ledkov]

During kernel package builds compressing debs often takes a very long time
without any feedback.

I was considering to start patching dpkg-deb to fork and compress things
via pv to get progress output in the build logs.

I can't remember where, but it would be nice for pv to output info after a
delay. I.e. if operation is quick don't bother, but after like 10s start
showing progress output would be nice.

On Fri, 22 Apr 2022, 17:58 Bryce Harrington, <bryce.harrington at canonical.com>
wrote:

> The Ubuntu Server team is looking at several potential items to promote
> to main, including cli admin tools that might have broad usefulness.
> One of these we're on the fence about and would like broader input.
>
> pv, 'Pipe Viewer' is a command line utility that essentially copies
> stdin to stdout, and displays an animated progress bar.
>
> Standard example is compressing a large file, e.g.:
>
>   $ pv Mail/spam.assassin  | gzip > /tmp/spam.gz
>   31.3MiB 0:00:01 [31.3MiB/s] [===========>                             ]
> 31% ETA 0:00:02
>
> pv can also be used in the middle of pipelines (although since it
> doesn't know the stream's size it can't estimate % progress):
>
>   $ mysqldump -uroot -p database1 | pv | gzip -9 > database1.sql.gz
>   53.7MiB 0:00:01 [29.7MiB/s] [ <=>
>              ]
>
> Overview: https://catonmat.net/unix-utilities-pipe-viewer
> Man page: https://linux.die.net/man/1/pv
> LP page:  https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pv
>
>
> Googling indicates that pv comes up very commonly as a general purpose
> solution to displaying progress, although there do appear to be
> main-provided solutions for at least some common situations.  For simply
> copying files, there is already rsync which has --progress and --status
> options.  For creating tarballs, tar has a --checkpoint option, though
> it's not fancy.  For copying streams, dd is in main, which has a
> status=progress option that animates the bytes copied (but not %'s or
> visual bars).
>
> That said, pv looks like it would be a relatively light addition to
> main; it's written in C, appears to have an active upstream, and looks
> pretty self-contained.  A MIR for pv looks like it would be reasonably
> straightforward to file.  With it in main, other packages could rely on
> having it available for providing progress info, and would make it more
> at hand for scripting, tutorials/howto's, tech support, etc.
>
>
> Does this look useful enough to you that it should be made available by
> default?  Are there alternatives you feel would be better to look at?
> Or other considerations that need made before deciding?
>
> Thanks,
> Bryce
>
>
>
>
>
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