On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 2:31 PM, DaB.WP@daniel.baur4.info wrote:
the truth is that we don't know it. If all goes well, it take a few days (I think River meant "days" insteadt of "hours") to reimport a cluster. Should we say next time "It need 1 month" and then after maybe 4 days "We are back ealier!" (the Scotty-methode) - would that help?
We can give the best estimate we have, and revise it occasionally as things progress. Like "The dump should take something like 2-4 days if all goes well, and potentially much longer if errors occur and it has to be restarted." If the initial estimate turns out to be wrong, we can revise it. In this case we gave a bad estimate and then didn't give revised estimates once the original estimate was clearly wrong. That's an understandable mistake on our part given the givens (volunteers etc.), but it's also understandable that it will annoy users if we forget to give them essential information, and we shouldn't be snapping at them for getting annoyed at our failures.