I was importing an export of my pubring, 38mb ~1100 keys into kleopatra. It took about as long as it took on the command line ~1 minute. So that is nice. But the progress never changed from 0 %, then suddenly to 50% and then suddenly to 100%.
Maybe a knight rider progress would be better in that case? Otherwise users might think that the import is hanging and abort.
Well the progress is by file and type of import (OpenPGP, S/MIME, groups). Is importing a 38 MB keyring really a use case that is worth changing perfectly working behavior? People, rightfully, hate knight rider progress because it gives no indication at all when it's finished.
Maybe there's a way to make the per-file progress more granular, e.g. gpg could emit how much bytes it has already processed. So, in my opinion, progress reporting needs to be improved in gpg/gpgsm. (Unless gpg/gpgsm do already report progress when importing a large file.)
Well staying at 0 is imo worse then knight rider because that looks "stuck" and knight rider looks "working".
I am currently thinking of at least a customer who will want to try this out in their environment and would like to encourage some power users to try it this way, and the feedback "Its stuck at 0 percent" will inevitably come. I am not saying this is a blocker but it is an ugly impression. Maybe we can just check for if files == 1 then knight rider, and otherwise keep it as is?
Yes some progress from GnuPG might be nice but I don't think that this would be easily added.