Russel Winder wrote:
I small thought about messages to the user. I will raise a JIRA if that
is appropriate. For a "missing task" invocation of Gradle I get:
|> gradle coverage
Build failed with an exception.
Run with -s or -d option to get more details. Run with -f option to get
the full (very verbose) stacktrace.
Task 'coverage' not found in root project 'ADS'.
BUILD FAILED
Total time: 4.154 secs
|>
A number of things:
-- the fact that the build failed with an exception is irrelevant to me
and as a user I don't even know what an exception is -- except that it
is clearly not something that should happen, it is an exception. This
creates stress.
-- As a user I am not going to be interested in stack traces. In fact
I may not even know what a stack trace is or how to use it. More
stress.
I agree - the user may or may not know what these things are.
The message is intended to give the user some clues as to what to do
next, to help them figure out what went wrong. It's not that useful for
the above failure. Perhaps these hints should be contextual, rather than
generic. For example, in the failure above, we could let the user know
about gradle -t, and not mention anything about -d, -s, -f or stack traces.
We would still need a generic hint, which could be something like: Run
gradle -? to find out about command-line options for debugging failures.
-- Aha now I get something I wanted and needed to know :-)
-- Ant started this highly non-Unix philosophy of printing out "BUILD
SUCCEEDED" or "BUILD FAILED" and the time it took. There has been some
discussion of this point associated with Gant, and the overall decision
is not not print this by default. I prefer the Unix philosophy to the
Ant approach.
And I prefer the current behaviour. I'm not sure how we resolve UI
issues like this, other than to support multiple UI themes (ant style,
minimal, my-very-first-gradle-ui style), and give the user some way to
select a particular theme in a config file.
Given that the command-line is the primary UI for Gradle (for now, at
least), and that people spend a lot of time watching at it, some degree
of personalisation might be worth the effort.
-- As a corollary to the above, I wonder if printing out the phases
should not be the default? (This is probably more contentious.)
Another option would be to show some kind of progress indicator. And
there's the option of showing nothing until something goes wrong (which
I personally don't like at all)
Adam
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