[bug#32634] RFC: Process build output

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Hi Danny,

>> Honestly, I’m not really happy with the results, but I think it’s enough
>> to start a discussion about where this should lead.
>
> I think it's at least vastly better than bothering a normal user with build 
> output
> (which happens pretty often).

Yes, that’s what I thought as well.

>> I don’t know about whether the colours are any good; I think the bold
>> green is hard to read on a bright terminal, 
>
> Yeah, it's unfortunate that some terminals just swap black and white instead
> of inverting all the colors (which would mean that light green becomes dark 
> green
> etc).
>
>>while the black is hard to
>> read on a dark terminal.
>
> Hehe.

Do you know of any “best practices” in that field?  Maybe there are some
terminal capabilities / settings I should query first…?

Or should we look for settings in, say, ~/.config/guix/colors?

>> Lastly: the spinner.  It’s a bit boring, I think.
>
> Yeah :)
>
> In this case, boring is good.  It's mostly just to reassure the user that the
> build didn't hang (which unfortunately can always happen in principle).
>
> An overall progress bar would be nicer - but it would have to be supported by
> the build system - and worse, by "make" etc.  I think that this would be
> a larger but worthwhile project.

Yeah, it’s very difficult.  With CMake the progress indicator is
built-in; but with plain Make it’s really not easy to get an advance
estimate of the amount of work that will be done and to get an idea of
how many tasks are still remaining.

> I did a Knight Rider style spinner in the past, but it's not really adding
> anything and it was too distracting to me.

Heh :)

-- 
Ricardo

PS: I noticed a bug in this implementation: NO_COLOR is ignored for the
address@hidden lines; I’ll fix this before pushing later tonight.