August 2007 Archives

Version 1.1.0 of PV has been released. This release incorporates some fixes for Mac OS X, a couple of packaging cleanups, a dramatic improvement in the resource usage of the --rate-limit (-L) option, and two new features.

The first new feature to be added, --line-mode (-l) was a Debian wishlist request. This causes PV to count lines instead of bytes. While it's not something I have ever particularly wanted myself, it does sound like it might come in handy occasionally (and, more importantly, it didn't require much to be added to the code to make it work).

The second was one that I have occasionally found myself wanting, particularly during long network data transfers. The --remote (-R) option allows the settings of an already-running PV to be altered. This can be used to change the rate limit while a transfer is in progress, for example, or set PV's idea of the total size of all data to something different.

Version 1.2.7 of QSF has been released. Like the recent PV release, this was prompted by inclusion in the Fedora Project and the resultant need to change the license to Artistic 2.0.

QSF's development is, again like PV, moving from SourceForge to Google Code.

Version 1.0.1 of PV has been released. This is a code cleanup release, prompted by the discovery that PV has been included in the Fedora Project - version 0.9.9 is available now in FC7 and as an "extra" package in FC6.

It can be interesting to go back to old code and see how the style has changed over time. With a fresh perspective, a few oddities were more obvious, so the occasional untidy section was rewritten and a few more comment blocks were added. The organisation of the functions was changed a bit so that the "command-line program" part is now distinct from the "PV functionality" part, which means if I decide in future to create a library to add progress indicators to other command-line programs it will be significantly easier. Not that it's likely, but it seemed to make things neater.