On Wed, Jan 11, 2006 at 07:26:25AM +1100, Daniel Carosone wrote:
I object because the dots show movement, but lose information on how
many more dots are needed till it finishes, especially when I have a
screenful of dots.
I changed it because having a long list of numbers output quickly is
neither user-friendly, nor useful. The old code was also double-spacing
on many terminal emulaters (eg from sysinst on a serial console).
As a 'something is still happening' outputting dots and numbers have
much the same value, except that with dots the command itself is
unlikely to scroll off the screen.
Naive users are also likely to wonder what all the numbers mean - after
all you'll never want all of them! Although the first few could be deemed
useful.