User Friendly Progress Output

[azriel91]

User Friendly Progress Output

Progress Rendering

During command execution, to provide understandable output, we should have:

• Progress bars
• Elapsed time
• Estimated time remaining
• Enough information -- not too little, not too much.
• Color/Colour indicating importance of information, as well as status (queued/pending, success, in progress, failure, error)

Progress Data Model

Because peace is intended to support:

• interactive command line
• build logging
• machine readable output
• web request output

Then:

• The progress information needs to be serializable.
• It should contain enough information to be rendered.
• On a web page, detail may be collapsible, so including more information may be okay to avoid additional round trip time.

Bonus

For a CLI process / web request that is executed separately to the process that is running the command execution, the progress information needs to be retrievable independently. So:

• Progress information needs to be retrievable by a separate process -- perhaps written to / read from disk, or exposed on a well-known port.

Available Libraries

The libraries should ideally support async Rust with tokio, since that's what peace uses.

• prodash: Good for CLI usage and build logging, and uses tokio.

• indicatif: Good for CLI usage, spawns its own threads. This is used in choochoo / ops_ux.

  This is compatible with tokio and would compile to WASM once Remove "fs" feature in tokio dependency. console-rs/indicatif#504 is merged and released.

  Also, the CLICOLOR_FORCE=1 variable must be set if running the indicatif tests.

• zzz: Minimal progress bar, tokio ready.

• spinners: Nice looking spinners.

[azriel91]

Should consider:

• Library agnostic progress types.

  • Allows us to serialize the progress output for web and native targets

  • Allows another process to read the progress of an existing running process.

  • indicatif spawns its own threads and writes to stdout/stderr or something TermLike.

    Ideally we want something that:

    • Writes to W: AsyncWrite
    • Uses tokio's executor instead of spawning more threads.
    • Uses rich types for its unit of work, so that progress bars can be styled for the point of err.

• Translatable progress messages, e.g. with fluent

  Something to consider for error messages as well.

Tasks:

• Design progress model.
• Implement progress model.
• Implement CliProgressOutput -- update CliOutput to support progress bars.
• Implement JsonProgressOutput -- update CliOutput to output JSON for progress.
• Use is-terminal to automatically switch between displaying progress bars or logging.