Show more details about the "Last Successful Prebuild"

[jankeromnes]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe

This is a follow-up to #13801 which introduced a Use Last Successful Prebuild button in the "Prebuild in Progress" screen:

It would be nice to show details about this "last successful prebuild" that you can use, e.g.:

• What commit is it based on? How old is that commit? How much has changed since that commit?
• How long did this older prebuild originally take to build?

Describe the behaviour you'd like

• would like to see the details of the last prebuild:
  • what was the commit point of the last prebuild, how many commits since, some sense of the delta
  • how long did it take? (oh 40 minutes, the current prebuild is at 3 minutes so it’s going to be a long time if I wait)

Source: #13801 (comment)

Here is a quick super-ugly attempt to show such information directly inside the Use Last Successful Prebuild button:

Describe alternatives you've considered

Additional context

[jankeromnes]

On a side note: This Use Last Successful Prebuild button doesn't have to be right next to Skip Prebuild -- it could actually also be moved into a dropdown menu, e.g. with a split button like so:

           [ Skip Prebuild | v ]
 ______________________________
| Use Last Successful Prebuild |
|              ...             |
|______________________________|

[laushinka]

It would be nice to show details about this "last successful prebuild" that you can use, e.g.:

Nice! Could be useful to keep in mind what "successful" means too, as we currently create a prebuild for init tasks that fail. [Related issue]

[jankeromnes]

Good point @laushinka!

Also, if it helps, here is some inspiration taken from GitHub and GitLab on how to give a sense of "How much has changed since commit X?" (but basically, it's a total number of added lines & removed lines):

GitHub	GitLab

Thought: Maybe we could get away with just a green and a red number? (E.g. +54 -2) Or maybe something very explicit like the example below?

4 commits behind (5 changed files, 13 additions, 7 deletions)

[geropl]

@jankeromnes Do you think this is still relevant, as we are promoting (automatic) incremental workspaces now? 🤔

[jankeromnes]

@geropl Good catch! No, I indeed think that our current approach (automatically re-using an older prebuild when possible) is better than offloading choice and complexity onto our users.

Let's close this ticket for now. I believe #14479 is now the more relevant issue, if we want to provide more clarity to users when an older prebuild is used, but I'd also consider that one low-priority until we get more user feedback (e.g. if users are never confused about which prebuild is being used, I guess that would mean we did a good job making the prebuild-selection intuitive and unproblematic -- in that case, maybe we wouldn't even need extra clarification).

@gtsiolis apologies for the back-and-forth here! I hope you hadn't started spending time on a design here. 🙈

[gtsiolis]

Thanks for the ping, @jankeromnes!

I hope you hadn't started spending time on a design here.

No, this was still on the product design inbox. 😁

I believe #14479 is now the more relevant issue

Let's keep that open as you mentioned to keep track of this. I think bringing better visibility of which commit you're using in the prebuild could be useful on the workspace start, if not also on the workspaces list. 💭