Without a better progress indicator, one can falsely think that formatting has hung

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
python

Research direction

Start by locating mintstick's formatting workflow and how it currently reports formatter activity, then determine whether ext4 or FAT32 operations expose usable progress data. Done means a long-running format shows changing progress or a meaningful estimate instead of only a busy indicator, without claiming precision the formatter cannot provide.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

The problem. I formatted a USB stick to ext4. The stick was 32GB. So one might think that format will take a while. But, still, formatting - at least when FAT32? - can be quick. This format was slow - so slow, that I considered removing drive. I thought the formatting had hung. But then the formatting completed.

The solution: have the formatter show more than a busy-type indicator. That is, have it show a percentage or something like that (and the indicator need not be very accurate). It's true that a drive reporting that it is X% formatted might still have hung, but if one can see progress - X%, then X+Y% - one is less likely to be misled. Still, perhaps the low-level formatting process does not give much data about progress. In that case, perhaps mintstick could estimate, in advance, the likely time, and then do something, indicator wise, with that (well, with that and the elapsed time).

mintstick 1.6.2

Dominant language
Python
Stars
173
Forks
64
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

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