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Do not print all elements and their status on every invocation #2141
Description
For one, in my experience, it is not immediately useful as it is not a graph but a simple list. Without dependency information, it is not that obvious (to me at least) why a certain element is being rebuilt.
Similarly to #2140, it adds a lot to the clutter of printed output with every consecutive invocation of the tool. I think, similarly, it should be hidden under the verbose flag and optionally a new flag for this purpose.
Activity
abderrahim commentedon Jul 9, 2026
The idea is that this information is useful in a non-interactive setting (e.g. in CI) to be able to debug afterwards. It's indeed not very user friendly, and we should consider a better.
Will Salmon experimented with different UX options in his https://gitlab.com/girderstream/girderstream/ project. We might use that for inspiration in a future rework of buildstream's frontend.
ada-magicat commentedon Jul 9, 2026
I think this being part of a verbose flag and that flag being by default (#2150) is the best solution.
If I am to go by the example output in it's own book, its output still looks highly esoteric and even more cryptic as to what it is doing at first glance.
abderrahim commentedon Jul 9, 2026
The default output is still kinda cryptic, but there is at least an interactive alternative UI.
ada-magicat commentedon Oct 2, 2026
Calculating this also slows down the tool's start, so this is yet another reason to not show this by default.
abderrahim commentedon Oct 11, 2026
#2199 shows what it would feel if we didn't have to show the pipeline status (it does this by breaking the pipeline status, so it can't be yet merged as-is)