Time estimates in days+hours+minutes are overly precise

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

Binary package hint: update-manager

Ubuntu 7.04

A few minutes ago, the "Distribution Upgrade" window told me there were "About 2 days 1 hours 15 minutes remaining". Now, it tells me there are "About 1 days 10 hours 17 minutes reminaing".

This bug is not about the plurals (bug 87914), it is about the precision. Realistically, if there's more than a day remaining, Update Manager can't accurately estimate the number of minutes in addition to the number of hours. And even if it could, it wouldn't be very interesting.

So if there is more than a day remaining, the estimate should be to the nearest hour, not the nearest minute. (Arguably, the same is true even if the estimate is less than a day - "About 9 hours" has a higher signal-to-noise ratio than "About 8 hours 51 minutes" does. Perhaps minutes start becoming relevant once the estimate is less than about 2 hours.)

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

I agree that this needs to be fixed. I'm just not sure if we should do it for gutsy and break the translation of this message.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

If it helps, I don't think it's worth breaking translations for. :-)

[Fabián Rodríguez (magicfab)]

Mind you, this is not translted in french.

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

I changed the code so that minutes will no longer be displayed for times > 24h.

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

Same for times > 3h (no minutes will be displayed then).

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package update-manager - 1:0.96

---------------
update-manager (1:0.96) jaunty; urgency=low

  * UpdateManager/Core/MetaRelease.py:
    - deal with full disks better when downloading
      the meta-release information (LP: #98666)
  * DistUpgrade/DistUpgradeView.py:
    - make the FuzzyTimeToStr() function not display
      minutes when the total time is > 3h (LP: #144455)
  * build update-manager-text package with text/newt based
    update-manager frontend (update-manager-text)
  * DistUpgrade/DistUpgradeQuirks.py:
    - check if both grub and lilo are installed and remove
      the one that is not used (LP: #314004)
  * po/POTFILES.in, po/POTFILES.skip:
    - updated
  * po/update-manager.pot:
    - refreshed

 -- Michael Vogt <email address hidden> Mon, 12 Jan 2009 14:12:27 +0100