The installer counts 'preparation' time to whole install and does'n subsctract this value when counting rest of the time by number of installed/waiting packages, ie when doing (time / number_of_already_installed_packages) the 'time' is penalized by 'preparation' time and thus estimated time (multipled by waiting_packages) is longer than should be. The remaining time is thus very large when first few packages are installed and then installer cutting total time down as more packages are installed and preparation phase takes less part than sum of passed installation time. On my system with low memory and slow processor (P150/32MB) installer show up estimated time about 50 hours and after 10 - 20 packages it hit 2 hours and finally about 1 hour.
I think I fixed this - please try again with beta 3.
This defect is considered SHOULD-FIX for Fairfax.
*** Bug 49623 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Have you had a chance to try with Beta 3 (Roswell)?
Looks better, but there is still a long delay between "Setting up RPM transaction" and "Preparing to install" progress bars.
There are several places we cannot monitor the progress of rpm happenings because they are in a black box in rpmlib, with no callbacks to the UI. We intend on fixing these delays as rpm development allows, but not for this release.