The percentage says an update is alive. It does not say what it is alive
doing, and for the longest stretch of a run there was no way to find out:
an AUR package compiling for a quarter of an hour talks constantly, and
every word of it went into a file nobody was looking at.
So the run log's last five lines now travel with the progress entry and
sit under Details, refreshed every two seconds for as long as the update
lasts. Polled rather than followed, for the same reason the pacman
watcher polls: only the last few lines are ever displayed, so every line
in between would be work nobody sees, and re-reading the tail whole makes
truncation and rotation of the log a non-event.
The job model behind this interface carries exactly two description
fields - descriptionValue1 and 2, there is no third - so one stays with
the package being worked on and the other takes the tail. Newlines inside
a field do render, which is what lets five lines share one of them. They
travel tab separated because the protocol is one instruction per line,
and a tab inside a log line becomes a space first: either renders as
whitespace, but a line split in half renders as nonsense. Five lines
clipped to 120 columns also keeps an instruction well inside PIPE_BUF,
which is what makes the write atomic against the runner sending its own
progress down the same pipe.
An unattended run takes twenty minutes and said nothing at all while it worked.
The notification area now carries a live entry for the duration - which step is
running, which package is being unpacked, item count, percentage. It is a job
in the sense of org.kde.JobViewServer, the same mechanism Dolphin uses while
copying files, rather than a notification, which is what makes it a real bar
instead of a line of text.
That mechanism needs a process of its own. The desktop ties a job to the D-Bus
connection that requested it and withdraws it the moment that connection
closes, so gdbus, busctl and dbus-send cannot drive one at all - every
invocation is a fresh connection that closes again immediately. A small helper
therefore runs inside each graphical session for the length of the update,
holding the connection open and taking instructions on stdin. It needs
python-gobject; without it there is no bar and nothing else changes. Position
within the repository step is read from pacman's own "(120/260) upgrading foo"
lines. Its other (n/m) sequences are ignored on purpose: checking keys, package
integrity and loading files each count up to the same total, and following them
would run the bar to the end three times before the first package was unpacked.
The "system updated" notification never arrived, which is what prompted looking
at any of this. Tagged notifications were posted with --replace-id naming the
start message, and Plasma silently drops a Notify() whose replaces_id points at
an expired notification: no bubble, no error, and the id it hands back is the
dead one it just ignored. The start bubble times out in seconds and a run lasts
minutes, so the result fell into exactly that hole every single time. The
previous message is now withdrawn and a fresh one posted.
How long a message stays is set per message rather than left to the daemon.
Anything reporting that the machine still needs a person - a failed update, a
locked package database, packages that had to be held back - waits until it is
dismissed. Everything else times out on its own, a successful update included;
nothing should have to be clicked away for having gone right. Daemons do keep
critical-urgency messages up and the specification asks them to, but that is a
should, it says nothing about the normal-urgency messages here that still need
somebody to act, and urgency separately governs sound and do-not-disturb.
"Restart recommended" is gone, and NotifyReboot with it. The running kernel
loses its module tree the moment pacman unpacks the new one, so the notice
fired while the run was still building AUR packages and pulling Flatpaks, where
it reads as an invitation to restart in the middle of an update. The state is
still recorded and cachy-auto-update status still reports it. The option went
rather than only its default, because an installed system keeps its own
configuration file and would have carried on notifying regardless.
Felitendo