Friday 29 April 2022

Re: pv (a pipeline progress indicator) in main?

Thanks all, good feedback both on some items to check into and general
interest in seeing this go into main. Also has been some good off-list
feedback on some logistics details. I think the general sense is we'll
move forward with it, but first need to digest the input as a team and
plan out our next actions.

Bryce

On Fri, Apr 22, 2022 at 09:58:14AM -0700, Bryce Harrington 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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