Version: (using Devel) OS: MS Windows Installed from: Compiled sources It would be nice if emerge displayed some kind of progress indicator during SVN checkouts, or if this is not easily possible, at least a message that a package is going to be checked out. For example, I just wondered why it seemed to be sitting around idly after the first few lines (build type and such), until I fired up ProcessMonitor and realized that it was busy checking out all of oxygen-icons…
Okay, I just discovered that there are multiple verbosity levels, this already fulfils my wish. I am wondering, however, if setting the default verbosity a bit higher (so that the user e.g. knows that a time-consuming command is being run) would be a good idea. Please feel free to RESOLVE INVALID this bug if you don't think so.
I would personally leave this to upstream (svn), and not each project using svn. What do others think? Can we close this as RESOLVED/UPSTREAM?
I must admit that I have not been using KDE/Windows for quite some time now. However, at least back in 2010, there was a definite usability problem, in that emerge could sit around for a considerable time without writing printing any updates to the terminal and without any informational message beforehand (e.g. »checking out <xyz>, this might take a while«). This is hardly an upstream problem, as SVN already displays a progress indicator in the form of the list of files being checked out – I don't think a literal progress bar would be necessary.
I had the impression, that is achievable by the verbosity level as you wrote. The problem is that with a high verbosity level by default aside from the majority does not need all the information: it slows down the process a little bit as well in the Windows command prompt. Meanwhile, I understand it can cause troubles for you and certain other people, otherwise unfortunately, it would cause problems for the majority who do not need verbose enough level by default. They would get a more bloated and slower operation than necessary for their workflow.
Setting the verbosity level to something higher prints out the SVN output directly, so you get some feedback. But this is an extra change you have to make, and once you are not a newcomer anymore, you probably know what is happening anyway. Seriously, I was not suggesting to dump all the SVN info on the console all the time. Just add a little one-line message or whatever else which makes clear to the user that a potentially time-consuming network operation is running in the background. I suppose I'm not the only one who would find that this avoids confusion on the user side, as package managers tend to do this by default on fetching packages, etc. :)
Fetching progress bar is solved by upstream. Checking out progress is not yet solved by upstream (svn). We could work that around if it gets a big problem, why not try to report and get fixed centrally in SVN, and not in each project? There is always the option for polling the folder size. Also, I think a message like "this operation may take a while" might be unfortunatly confusing after X time as well because it could still be frozen and so forth without knowing what is going on. So a real fix should come to SVN in my opinion. Then, we could enable that by default. Also, you would not need to know this all the time just in the very beginning, perhaps once. After that, it would not be much of help anymore without a real progressbar upstream.
This bug has had its resolution changed, but accidentally has been left in NEEDSINFO status. I am thus closing this bug and setting the status as RESOLVED to reflect the resolution change.