Minimal output from the build log (no news is good news)?

1

Recently I am working on minimized display of the build output (no news is good news).

The idea is that build system should only output compiler warnings/errors and minimal descriptions to indicate a failure, like this https://github.com/rescript-lang/rescript-compiler/issues/4669

One thing I am not uncertain is that shall we also do some display to indicate that the build system is working (otherwise some long running process without any output would probably be a bad user experience).

Do you think we should display progress or not by default?

3 Likes
2

I really like the minimal output I think that should be default behaviour,
and about progress since the compiler is fast enough (even for a clean build on a large scale project) this can be hidden, and maybe shown via a flag. but IMO showing progress is not that noisy in general.

1 Like
3

I would be happy if there was a way to turn off the build printing every file it’s compiling. Locally it’s just on one line, but in CI it’s printing (in my case) about 1500 lines including dependencies.

4

I like the idea of minimizing output very much. I’d suggest to have at least a final statement: everything compiled / encountered errors

I’m not sure how long build times are for other larger projects. - Our longest builds have been about 7 minutes.
If building takes longer than a given time (a couple of minutes?) I think it would be nice to inform the dev about the progress.

1 Like
5

Our longest builds have been about 7 minutes.

Eh what? How many files?

1 Like
6

Do all output info share the same pattern ?
like what is shown in the image:

<error|warning> number <code>
<path>:<location>
<code extract> 
<reason>

That would be awesome.
This is not the case for older versions of bucklescript and make output parsing not reliable.

7

Hi, to make changes less disruptive, I hide most output but still update the progress so you won’t get surprise behavior.
This would be a strictly better improvement.
Note on CI it’s always recommended to turn on verbose mode