[gentoo-portage-dev] Progress indicator for emerge

[Magnus Johansson]

Hi!

I've written an emake replacement that shows the progress of the make.
I've used this for about four weeks with daily emerges, and it 
Works For Me (tm), with some (mostly) minor issues. I've attached it to
this mail, and it looks something like this in action:

[./configure output snipped]
Guesstimating...
Now starting make...
2.30%

Error messages are still being shown, but stdout is suppressed.

Known issues
--------------------
* It works by first doing a dry run of make. This adds some overhead,
but in my experiece it is worth it. Compared to the actual make time
it is negligible.
* The estimate is sometimes slightly off. It is very hard to correctly
guess the amount of work make has to do, but in most cases the
actual make is finished within 95%-105% of the estimate, which is
good enough for me.
* With some ebuilds the estimate is really, really off. This goes for
ebuilds where the ./configure does not create all necessary Makefiles
from the beginning, but rather lets the first Makefile create new ones.
In this case the estimate will be useless since it will only be based on
the first Makefile. ebuilds that fall into this category are e.g. firefox and
Xorg. ebuilds that use the ordinary autoconf/automake-tools don't have
this problem (which is most of them). KDE works for example perfectly.
* I've come across one ebuild that won't work with my emake replacement:
thunderbird. So you may want to keep the original emake around :-)
I've no clue why it won't work. Any suggestions are welcome.

The script has two files: emake and progressmeter, so you need to put
both in /usr/lib/portage/bin/ and make sure they can be executed.

Any feedback is appreciated.

Regards,
Magnus Johansson