While formating, and setting a LVM on big (1 Tera) hard drive disk, writing partition table, setting blocks, writing inode tables etc. could be *really* long. It tooks me more than 4hours!!! And the user has just the blue bar going from left to right and backward, without knowing what is happening. Only a fuzzy message is printed, like writing /dev/sda1 partition (for 3hours?!) From the text console, I got things moving with several steps like writing partition table: 1/5557 … … Writing inodes table: 1/5557 … … Showing the blocks ration will tell the user that the process is still going forward… I were using F17 Alpha and ext4 format.
Screen scraping to display progress is almost always a bad idea, because it ties us to today's particular output format and means our progress reporting is going to break whenever the other program changes. Sorry it took so long for you. This is likely related to other disk slowness we've been hearing about. I formatted a very large drive a few weeks back and it did not take anything near three hours.
Ok, understood. On the new design, I hope the user will know at least that things are moving :)