A "pause installation" or "save list" should be added

[guilloip]

Some times it is needed to pause the installation process. Maybe because you need to turn off your computer or doing something else not related with software packages at all.

For example, image that you need to download something very important but your Internet connection sucks and the installation process is running, or anything else.

You can stop the installation, of course, but when you open software-center back your packages selection is lost.

There should be an auto-save or optional save for the "to be installed" selection list.

Design: <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SoftwareCenter#pause>

[Omer Akram (om26er)]

I am not certain if apt even supports pausing installations. but for the other part of the bug i.e. saving selction bug 464515 might be relevant

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

This is a neat idea. Thanks for reporting it, guilloip. I've now specified a "Pause" function that should pause all current tasks. <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SoftwareCenter#pause>

But even that wouldn't be enough for the case where your Internet connection sucks. dpkg's typical behavior in that situation is just to try and fail, so any queued tasks would rapidly disappear. So I've also specified a final step, that USC should go into Paused mode automatically when you don't have an Internet connection.

[joy23 (shakespear-joy)]

Is option to add your own download mangers (axel,aria2,wget,etc.) to USC even possible?

[Jack Twilley (mathuin)]

If dpkg can't be paused, perhaps a throttle option to USC which limits the bandwidth used by dpkg? This would achieve the goal specified by the original requestor and not interfere too directly with dpkg itself.

Jack.

[Lee (qq510371827)]

My suggestions and user cases:
1). Pause installation. Sometimes the network is slow so i could pause installation and resume the task later.
2).Cancel an ongoing installation and roll back. I can cancel a slow installation process without breaking anything.
3). Parallel downloading. Download multiple apps simultaneously and automatically assign a higher priority to the fastest one. This can help to save lots of time for me and ease my pain for endlessly waiting.
4).Show real-time downloading speed and percentage of task completion.
Thanks.