Checkbox

checkbox-cli doesn't wait for password before filling the screen with dots while "gathering information"

Bug #926104 reported by Jeff Lane  on 2012-02-03

This bug affects 2 people

Affects		Status	Importance	Assigned to	Milestone
	Checkbox	Fix Released	High	Unassigned	Checkbox 0.14.x "Before Q release"

Bug Description

When the user runs checkbox-cli, the user gets the intro prompt saying "Press any key to continue..."

Once the user hits a key, the next prompt is "Gathering information from your system..." at which point gksu or whatever is run to get the sudo privileges from the user to run the root level jobs. The problem is that, while on checkbox-gtk, the user gets a separate password popup, on cli, the progress meter (the dots that are printed to screen to indicate checkbox is doing something) can end up covering over the prompt for the password, making for a very confusing ui. For example, my screen looked like this:

Gathering information from your system...
.[sudo[ password for bladernr: ..............................................................................................................................................................................
...................................................................................................................................................................................

The line of "."'s had gotten well across the screen before I was ever ready to enter the password.

So I think that either the sudo part should be moved to happen immediately before the "gathering info" appears, or at the least, the progress dots should not start until after the user password or sudo privileges have been obtained.

I also took a picture of my actual monitor showing what happened... for clarity sake.

Related branches

lp:~brendan-donegan/checkbox/bug926104_cli_password_prompt

Rejected for merging into lp:checkbox

Brendan Donegan (community): Disapprove on 2013-01-17

Zygmunt Krynicki (community): Approve on 2012-09-25

Jeff Lane : Pending requested 2012-09-25

lp:~roadmr/checkbox/twirly

Merged into lp:checkbox at revision 1772

Brendan Donegan (community): Approve on 2012-10-15

Daniel Manrique (community): Needs Resubmitting on 2012-10-14

lp:ubuntu/raring-proposed/checkbox

Revision history for this message

Jeff Lane  (bladernr) wrote on 2012-02-03:

IMG_1369.JPG Edit (2.7 MiB, image/jpeg)

Here's a photo of my monitor taken before I actually had a chance to enter my password to continue with checkbox

Revision history for this message

Jeff Lane  (bladernr) wrote on 2012-03-20:

Confirming this and setting it to Medium. I know it will affect server testers and is quite annoying.

Changed in checkbox:
status:	New → Confirmed
importance:	Undecided → Medium
milestone:	none → 0.13.5

Sylvain Pineau (sylvain-pineau) on 2012-03-21

Changed in checkbox:
milestone:	0.13.5 → 0.13.6

Revision history for this message

Ara Pulido (ara) wrote on 2012-09-03:

Putting this as High. This needs to be fixed before Quantal.
This is very error prone for new Checkbox users

Changed in checkbox:
importance:	Medium → High
milestone:	0.13.6 → 0.14.x

Brendan Donegan (brendan-donegan) on 2012-09-12

Changed in checkbox:
assignee:	nobody → Brendan Donegan (brendan-donegan)
status:	Confirmed → In Progress

Revision history for this message

Brendan Donegan (brendan-donegan) wrote on 2012-09-12:

From what I can see, there's no real way to actually do this gracefully. Possibly we could update it to not put the dots on the command line when the password needs to be entered, I'll give it a try

Revision history for this message

Daniel Manrique (roadmr) wrote on 2012-09-12:

A comment! The CLI basically outputs dots when it's waiting for something. We can potentially change it to something that stays in place (like a "twirler". Sequentially print a backspace (to erase previous twirler) and one of these characters:

|/-\

This will look somewhat bad when the user is typing, but will give a progress indication while not filling the screen with unsightly gunk.

Revision history for this message

Jeff Lane  (bladernr) wrote on 2012-09-12: Re: [Bug 926104] Re: checkbox-cli doesn't wait for password before filling the screen with dots while "gathering information"

On 09/12/2012 09:45 AM, Daniel Manrique wrote:
> A comment! The CLI basically outputs dots when it's waiting for
> something. We can potentially change it to something that stays in place
> (like a "twirler". Sequentially print a backspace (to erase previous
> twirler) and one of these characters:
>
> |/-\
>
> This will look somewhat bad when the user is typing, but will give a
> progress indication while not filling the screen with unsightly gunk.
>

I think any of those would be fine, at least we could implement it and
see...

or would it be possible to simply turn the dots off completely for that
step?

The biggest complaint (from me and those who've run checkbox-cli a bit)
is that the dots filling up the screen make it appear as though you've
missed your opportunity to fill in the password at that point.

So my preference would be, in order:

* turn off dots completely for the password phase
* change the series of dots to a twirler

--
Jeff Lane - Hardware Certification Engineer and Test Tools Developer
Ubuntu Ham: W4KDH
Freenode IRC: bladernr or bladernr_
gpg: 1024D/3A14B2DD 8C88 B076 0DD7 B404 1417 C466 4ABD 3635 3A14 B2DD

Revision history for this message

Brendan Donegan (brendan-donegan) wrote on 2012-09-14:

Well, I can manage the spinner - but it's hard to verify since currently Checkbox refuses to give me the sudo prompt, even if I clear the sudo cache with 'sudo -k'

Brendan Donegan (brendan-donegan) on 2012-10-13