[bug#30053] [PATCH 1/3] Improve appearance of tabular output.

[Maxim Cournoyer <maxim.cournoyer@gmail.com>]

Hello,

Sarah Morgensen <iskarian@mgsn.dev> writes:

> Hi Maxim,
>
> Maxim Cournoyer <maxim.cournoyer@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> [...]
>> ---
>> Sample count: 567
>> Total time: 20.913633405 seconds (12.747006885 seconds in GC)
>>
>> Without the change 'guix package -A' runs in about 2 seconds.  With the
>> change it runs in about 12 seconds here.
>
> I cannot replicate this. Without the patch on master (7e0da2f):
>
> $ time ./pre-inst-env guix package -A > /dev/null
>
> real	0m5.473s
> user	0m6.698s
> sys	0m0.094s
>
>
> And with the patch:
>
> $ time ./pre-inst-env guix package -A > /dev/null
>
> real	0m5.778s
> user	0m6.862s
> sys	0m0.061s

I tested on a different machine after tweakwing the code slightly today,
and the results were not as bad as those I reported earlier.  Buffering
the output helped a lot.

> Perhaps there's something else going on there? I'm on x86-64, if that's
> useful.
>
>> Danny's suggestion to use 'guix package -A | columns -t' works too, but
>> it's not convenient nor discoverable.
>
> Definitely agree, though in my opinion neither that nor this *really*
> make `guix package --list-installed` pretty. I'm sure I could put
> together an alias but it goes a long way toward making Guix look
> polished to have it built-in.

Thanks for sharing your opinion!  I ended up pushing it to the repo a
bit earlier today; after I found it was running acceptably fast and set
an upper limit to the maximum column width so that the output would
remain compact enough.

You should have it available to try on your next 'guix pull', if you
haven't already :-).

Thanks,

Maxim