Smoother progress bar progressing while booting

Thank you for your bug report.

fhucho:
If you are asking what I think then this is very difficult and probably worthy of a PhD. The problem is you don't know how long each individual section is going to take because it is dependent on the hardware and the system's state so you just go by the number of tasks. If you have are booting off USB then a particular part may go very quickly because it's seeky. If you have a fast CPU then another part may go quickly because it was processor bound. Different hardware, software configuration and disk layout will take varying amounts of time. One idea from someone in the lab was to do timing tests based on hardware and try and match it up to similar hardware but this was highly speculative and is it stands it doesn't sound practical.

If what you meant was smooth movement inbetween discrete sections (e.g. slide then stop, slide then stop) please disregard the above and add a comment noting as much.

(We actually may do just a pulsating throbber instead of attempting to
guess progress)

Maybe it could be done this way: let's say that the booting has 3 "checkpoints" - A, B, C.
A - start (0%)
B - drivers are loaded
C - services are running, system is booted (100%)
Before checkpoint A, the system reads from some file - e.g. boottimes - what time last every booting phase (for example, after installation in boottimes is that AB lasts 10 s and BC lasts 50 s). So in every boot, the system reads boottimes and the progress bar behaves depending on the values in boottimes. And while booting it also measures the times (between A and B and C) and writes them in boottimes after booting finishes.

And of course, it would be better if the progress bar moved smoothly between every two checkpoints.

I think that I understand the point. I can reproduce that little *bug* on any computers. The first 20 seconds of the boot process, the usplash will show something like 5%, and then suddenly, it will go to 60%, and then 100% in the next 30 seconds. Since this is a wish, I set the Importance to Wishlist.

A new usplash theme based on time rather than init scripts is currently in development for next jaunty release (bug 299586). Since this project seems to be active, I set this bug report as a duplicate of this one.