This is very much a question of subjective taste, but about 95% of the time I
use progressbar (which is a great library by the way), it is with a list or
with an iterator who's size I know beforehand. And so, I always wind up writing
the same 3/4 lines to set up my progress bar.
I have attached a mercurial patch that adds a function to progressbar.py called
fixed_bar, which does exactly that. Would really appreciate it if you would
merge them in.