Feedback: init and status should provide some user feedback

[peterbourgon]

This is based on my first run with the tool. I propose that dep init and dep status should give some kind of immediate feedback to the user, to indicate they're going out to the network and the operation may take a little time. At the moment I don't have much confidence in what's going on.

What do we think? Should this be hidden behind a -v flag?

[sdboyer]

Gotta subdivide these into different cases. init first.

To be clear - looking at your gist, it seems like you ran dep init, rather than dep -v init. If you flip that on, it does provide a fair bit of feedback to the user, at least for those deps that are present in the current GOPATH. If all deps are present there, then init doesn't hit network at all, and all the info you want should already be in place.

There's a fair bit of other feedback that's provided with -v, though; I could see moving just the essential message (found version X of project Y) up to being unconditionally emitted.

If at least one dep project isn't found, then we have to fall back to solving. We could certainly provide some clearer output about what wasn't found locally, and has thus necessitated performing a solve. ...which will hit network, of which we could advise the user. From here, though, the network interaction question is entirely about what gps does, and so folds in with #67.

For status, the only network interaction we do is to look up the most recent list of versions for each project. I'd be fine with adding a "fetching latest version info" note there.

We could, perhaps, do it selectively - skipping, for example, anything in the lock with a plain/non-semver version or rev, as the idea of a "latest" there is semantically null (as you noted in your gist). Again, though, other improvements fold in with #67.

[jessfraz]

We could still provide more without -v, maybe like the list of packages its finding? Nothing is a bit odd

[sdboyer]

IMO at minimum it'd be worth outputting the projects+versions it finds, even without -v

[nathany]

My first run of dep init took 93 seconds without any feedback.
That's okay, but I don't see -v documented in dep help.

I tried -v and it worked. However, -v spams me with "no buildable Go source files in x" warnings. Looking for goldilocks verbosity.

[sdboyer]

@nathany Hm - does your local testing version include #194, which was merged this morning? That should provide more incremental feedback - perhaps more in the goldilocks zone.

[nathany]

Looks like I didn't. I was on 76df5ce, pulled earlier today. Things change so fast around here. 😉

It was much faster this time, but verbosity is still not great. My project folder has plenty of non-Go code, including folders in my .gitignore the report "no buildable Go source files" with -v.

UPDATE: apologies. I had used go install instead of go install ./... from the golang/dep folder. Much nicer with #194.

[sdboyer]

i'm gonna call this complete, just because we've totally overhauled init, even though status needs some work. more specific & recent issues will be better for status, anyway.