[bitbake-devel] New progress meters

[Trevor Woerner]

On Wed 2016-07-20 @ 08:29:52 AM, Paul Eggleton wrote:
       ^^^^^^^^^^
... talk about showing up late to the party! ;-)

> We can certainly do something like that - the progress handler sees all output 
> even if it doesn't contain anything interesting to it (e.g. % complete). The 
> trouble comes when the process prints out nothing - such as when linking a 
> very large binary. I'm not sure how you would introspect into that part of the 
> process.

Would it be possible to show progress such that once a recipe started to be
processed, it would remain in view until it was done (preferably in the same
relative location)?

Let's say you have a recipe abc.bb whose tasks are: fetch, unpack, patch,
configure, compile, deploy, package. I think it might be nice if, once bitbake
started processing abc, we saw something like:


	before-4.5.6 ...
	abc-1.2.3 do_fetch ===>
	after-0.9.8 ...

Then when the fetch was done we'd see

	before-4.5.6 ...
	abc-1.2.3 do_unpack ===|==>
	after-0.9.8 ...

then

	before-4.5.6 ...
	abc-1.2.3 do_patch ===|===|=>
	after-0.9.8 ...


Or, maybe:

	before-4.5.6 ...
	abc-1.2.3  =fetch=
	after-0.9.8 ...

	before-4.5.6 ...
	abc-1.2.3  =fetch=|=unpack=
	after-0.9.8 ...

	before-4.5.6 ...
	abc-1.2.3  =fetch=|=unpack=|=patch=
	after-0.9.8 ...

Maybe the different tasks could have their own colours? Perhaps the equals
signs could be used to show progress: as a task progresses more equals signs
would be printed, then the pipe drawn and the new task drawing started when
the next task begins? At the end of processing abc we might see something
like:

	abc-1.2.3 =fetch===========|=unpack=|=patch=|=configure====|=compile===========================================|=deploy===|=package==

which tells us that fetching and compiling were this recipe's largest jobs.

I guess the largest problem would be handling the vertical real-estate. With
hundreds of packages, the output would scroll off rather quickly. Maybe once a
recipe was complete it could drop off?