It's actually quite hard to build a front-end for fwupd at the moment
as you're never sure when the progress bar is going to zip back to 0%
and start all over again. Some plugins go 0..100% for write, others
go 0..100% for erase, then again for write, then *again* for verify.
By creating a helper object we can easily split up the progress of the
specific task, e.g. write_firmware().
We can encode at the plugin level "the erase takes 50% of the time, the
write takes 40% and the read takes 10%". This means we can have a
progressbar which goes up just once at a consistent speed.
Shim has had a hard time with loading updates from arguments in the
most recent release and this isn't the first time that happened.
Give distros and users an escape hatch that will allow using GRUB
instead.
