Bug 1145

Summary:	Make bitbake output less noisy for non-error cases
Product:	[Build System, Metadata & Runtime] Meta-yocto	Reporter:	Scott Garman <scott.a.garman>
Component:	meta-yocto	Assignee:	Paul Eggleton <bluelightning>
Status:	VERIFIED FIXED	QA Contact:
Severity:	enhancement
Priority:	Low	CC:	jiajun.xu, poky.bs.watcher, poky.watcher, richard.purdie, sgw, song.liu
Version:	1.0
Target Milestone:	1.2 M4
Hardware:	x86
OS:	Multiple
Whiteboard:	(P1)(QA Testing Completed) (Testing)
OS type for building Yocto:	---	Type of Regression:	---
Verified:		Documentation change:	---
Bug Depends on:
Bug Blocks:	1543

Description Scott Garman 2011-06-06 14:16:42 UTC

When soliciting input on error annoyances with bitbake, multiple people brought up that they felt the default UI is too verbose. 

Phil Blundell suggested that the task "Started" and "Succeeded" messages could be removed without losing important information. However, Chris Larson noted that postprocessing scripts may need to know when tasks start and complete. 

This suggests to me that some way of enabling/disabling this behavior may be a good compromise - disable the messages by default for humans, but allow it to be enabled for postprocessing (autobuilders, etc).

Comment 1 Jiajun Xu 2012-01-09 06:29:49 UTC

For the feature, I think QA need to design test case to disable/enable the "Start" "Succeeded" messages and check if it works. I will mark the bug as "Test Plan Ready".
Scott,
If you have more suggestions about testing for the feature, pls. tell me.

Thanks a lot.

Comment 2 Richard Purdie 2012-03-15 11:50:20 UTC

This issue is a tricky one since we do want the user to be aware of bitbake's progress but we don't want to drown them in information.

I've been experimenting with a alternative terminal UI to the progress information in the form of an updating footer to the log messages, see http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit.cgi/poky-contrib/commit/?h=rpurdie/wip2&id=f815e2120b22f011b16f6f31b9e049937562e45b

Here, we add a footer to the output which states task X of Y completed and then lists the currently active tasks. Existing log messages scroll as usual above the footer. Since the footer has all the appropriate information, we could then suppress the started/succeeded messages from the console.

For application compatibility, this functionality is only active on interactive terminals, non-interactive terminals would see the usual messages.

Current status of the code is that it works but:
  * We need to suppress the started/suceeded/running X messages
  * For larger numbers of processes, it refreshes too fast to read (need to time 
    limit the refresh)
  * The list of currently active processes should be sorted (currently 
    effectively random)

Comment 3 Richard Purdie 2012-03-29 18:49:49 UTC

This has been implemented as an alternative UI for the 1.2 release. It can be used adding the "-u knotty2" option to bitbake. This may become the default depending on user feedback.

The issues I mentioned in a previous entry here were all fixed.

http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit.cgi/poky/commit/?id=eeb0529e138fa95db8fc6ed74bcaee87804fcb6c

Comment 4 Jiajun Xu 2012-04-19 02:50:35 UTC

Test the feature with denzil branch, it could work. Verify the bug as fixed.