upload difficulty and global tahoe status ?

[Brian Warner]

On 7/17/15 10:01 AM, Freelab initiative wrote:

> but my biggest problem with tahoe backup is that until evything is
> uploaded the directory listing keeps being empty when i upload 100-200
> gB i would apreciate to see something before the last byte is uploaded
> 
> am i the only person to feels that being really a weird behavior ?

Yeah, it's a bit unusual. As I mentioned in
https://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2015-July/009514.html , the
"tahoe backup" command creates immutable-directory snapshots of your
local directory. It's trying to make a single coherent snapshot (like
Git or the other modern whole-tree-at-a-time version-control systems).
So there's no good way to have it present a partial backup: the output
directory is unmodified until the very last step, at which point
suddenly everything appears.

We could (and should) improve the UI, to let you know that progress is
happening even though a "tahoe ls" isn't showing anything. And maybe we
should build a second kind of backup command, which doesn't try to
provide snapshots, so you can see incremental progress.

You might be happier with "tahoe cp -r" instead of "tahoe backup": the
recursive copy will create all the target directories *first*, and then
copies the files in some order (maybe depth-first, maybe random, I
forget). That'll behave a lot like rsync: not quite as clever, but
certainly with more incrementally-visible results.

cheers,
 -Brian