Colors and progress indicators on buildprocesses

Colors and progress indicators on buildprocesses

[swedebugia]

Hi

I recently installed Parabola and have played around a bit with 
compiling AUR-packages to be able to run the programs I want - packaged 
or not.

Having build a lot on guixsd a while ago I noticed some differences in 
the cli-overview that I would like to present.

Colorfication and arrows (=>) are used to clearly distinguish 
pacaur/pacman-commands from the buildprocess output.

A nice thing I saw on some builds (build of qt during build of 
telegram-desktop) was a per build process percentage indicator located 
in the beginning of each line of build output like this:
[ 0% ] lorem ipsum....
[ 10% ] lorem ipsum....

In addition to these two above I have an idea as well:
Use the terminal-title wisely to show the progress of the whole 
transaction and the current running build (e.g.: "Download complete. 
Buildprogress 4/5: building qt"

What do you think?

Re: Colors and progress indicators on buildprocesses

[ng0]

swedebugia@riseup.net writes:

> Hi
>
> I recently installed Parabola and have played around a bit with 
> compiling AUR-packages to be able to run the programs I want - packaged 
> or not.
>
> Having build a lot on guixsd a while ago I noticed some differences in 
> the cli-overview that I would like to present.
>
> Colorfication and arrows (=>) are used to clearly distinguish 
> pacaur/pacman-commands from the buildprocess output.
>
> A nice thing I saw on some builds (build of qt during build of 
> telegram-desktop) was a per build process percentage indicator located 
> in the beginning of each line of build output like this:
> [ 0% ] lorem ipsum....
> [ 10% ] lorem ipsum....
>
> In addition to these two above I have an idea as well:
> Use the terminal-title wisely to show the progress of the whole 
> transaction and the current running build (e.g.: "Download complete. 
> Buildprogress 4/5: building qt"
>
> What do you think?
>
>

The problem with colors is that the use of colors in build logs creates
very difficult to read logs if you don't filter them. I think this is
one of the reasons why we don't have colors.
I am not against it, I just think it will make helping people a little
harder when they provide such logs. On the other hand, if we manage to
filter the colors out in the build logs somehow, this is of no concern
to us.
-- 
              ng0

Re: Colors and progress indicators on buildprocesses

[swedebugia]

On 2016-09-28 11:57, ng0 wrote:
> swedebugia@riseup.net writes:
> 
>> Hi
>> 
>> I recently installed Parabola and have played around a bit with
>> compiling AUR-packages to be able to run the programs I want - 
>> packaged
>> or not.
>> 
>> Having build a lot on guixsd a while ago I noticed some differences in
>> the cli-overview that I would like to present.
>> 
>> Colorfication and arrows (=>) are used to clearly distinguish
>> pacaur/pacman-commands from the buildprocess output.
>> 
>> A nice thing I saw on some builds (build of qt during build of
>> telegram-desktop) was a per build process percentage indicator located
>> in the beginning of each line of build output like this:
>> [ 0% ] lorem ipsum....
>> [ 10% ] lorem ipsum....
>> 
>> In addition to these two above I have an idea as well:
>> Use the terminal-title wisely to show the progress of the whole
>> transaction and the current running build (e.g.: "Download complete.
>> Buildprogress 4/5: building qt"
>> 
>> What do you think?
>> 
>> 
> 
> The problem with colors is that the use of colors in build logs creates
> very difficult to read logs if you don't filter them. I think this is
> one of the reasons why we don't have colors.
> I am not against it, I just think it will make helping people a little
> harder when they provide such logs. On the other hand, if we manage to
> filter the colors out in the build logs somehow, this is of no concern
> to us.

I understand.

What I proposed was not to color the logs but the output of guix (to 
distinguish it from the rest) telling the user what it is going to 
do/doing.
The proposal for percentage did not include coloring.

Re: Colors and progress indicators on buildprocesses

[John Darrington]

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On Wed, Sep 28, 2016 at 09:57:16AM +0000, ng0 wrote:
     
     The problem with colors is that the use of colors in build logs creates
     very difficult to read logs if you don't filter them. 

This is true. But the build logs already dump some VT100 escape sequences,
(for vertical  cursor movement).  And they also have to be filtered, so 
if we say that colours are not permitted then we are not applying these
rules consistently.


J'


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Re: Colors and progress indicators on buildprocesses

[Troy Sankey]

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Quoting John Darrington (2016-09-28 10:05:52)
> On Wed, Sep 28, 2016 at 09:57:16AM +0000, ng0 wrote:
>      
>      The problem with colors is that the use of colors in build logs creates
>      very difficult to read logs if you don't filter them. 
> 
> This is true. But the build logs already dump some VT100 escape sequences,
> (for vertical  cursor movement).  And they also have to be filtered, so 
> if we say that colours are not permitted then we are not applying these
> rules consistently.

This is our chance make things right!  Determine if the terminal is
interactive [0] and filter escape codes if yes.

I've used Arch, and the coloring was pleasant, but primarily I enjoyed
the clear (and less buggy) progress bars.  For example:

    $ guix pull
    
    Starting download of /tmp/guix-file.O3WsYp
    From http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/snapshot/master.tar.gz...
     ….tar.gz                                   1.7MiB/s 00:06 | 10.5MiB transferred


The "From" line shows what is about to be downloaded, but the progress
par suggests that "….tar.gz" is being downloaded.  There is a lot of
whitespace after that, which is weird.

Also, here's a bug:

    copying and compiling to '/gnu/store/himp5ds1b9m0932dfzxp3gg3vvs7lxd4-guix-latest'...
    loading...       23.1% of 528 filesrandom seed for tests: 1475073161
    loading...       99.8% of 528 files

Something happens during the loading phase, and the string "random seed
for tests: 1475073161" gets printed (also inserting a newline).  The
progress indicator cannot cope, so it starts on a new line.  Also, it
stops at 99.8% which is confusing.

These non-color issues are more important to resolve, IMO.

Troy

[0] http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/intandnonint.html

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Re: Colors and progress indicators on buildprocesses

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi!

swedebugia@riseup.net skribis:

> Colorfication and arrows (=>) are used to clearly distinguish
> pacaur/pacman-commands from the buildprocess output.
>
> A nice thing I saw on some builds (build of qt during build of
> telegram-desktop) was a per build process percentage indicator located
> in the beginning of each line of build output like this:
> [ 0% ] lorem ipsum....
> [ 10% ] lorem ipsum....
>
> In addition to these two above I have an idea as well:
> Use the terminal-title wisely to show the progress of the whole
> transaction and the current running build (e.g.: "Download
> complete. Buildprogress 4/5: building qt"
>
> What do you think?

I think these are all good ideas.  Especially colors, which could help a
lot (for non-Emacs terminals at least), and provide a more pleasant
experience.

Ludo’.