[PATCH] ui: add optional timestamp to output

[Gregory Szorc]

On Tue, Apr 11, 2017 at 12:54 PM, Jun Wu <quark at fb.com> wrote:

> Excerpts from Pierre-Yves David's message of 2017-04-11 20:24:00 +0200:
> >
> > On 04/11/2017 07:49 PM, Bryan O'Sullivan wrote:
> > >
> > > On Tue, Apr 11, 2017 at 7:15 AM, Augie Fackler <raf at durin42.com
> > > <mailto:raf at durin42.com>> wrote:
> > >
> > >     I'm missing some context. Why do we want timestamps in our output
> > >     like this?
> >
> > This is useful to audit the timing of various steps when debugging (eg:
> > discovery, cache computations, etc…).
> >
> > (I'm the one behind who motivated Mathieu to write this patch. I need
> > this feature on a regular basis)
> >
> > > That's what the ts command gives us on Linux. I don't think this needs
> > > to be integrated into Mercurial proper.
> >
> > Yes, `ts` can do this. However, piping to `ts` enable buffered output
> > for Python (and Mercurial). As a result the timestamp of line has no
> > relation with the time it was requested in the code. Sure one can
> > request non-buffered output, but at that point there start to be enough
> > obstacle than is get in the "complex" territory when requesting a trace
> > to a random user.
>
> That's what `stdbuf` solves. I don't think the "ts" feature should be in
> core hg, either.
>
> >
> > In addition, `tr` won't handle timestamp for buffered and remote output.
> >
> > So I think this patches has value on its own.


One thing that stdbuf + ts won't give you is correct handling of some
terminal control characters, such as coloring. For example, Clang doesn't
reset terminal attributes (sgr0) around newlines. So when piping `clang
-fcolor-diagnostics` to ts (you need -fcolor-diagnostics b/c clang will
turn off color when not writing to a TTY), the timestamps printed by ts
will be using whatever attributes the last output was using. This can
result in inconsistently colored and difficult-to-read output.

However, this deficiency does not apply to Mercurial, as color.colorlabel()
splits by newline and resets terminal attributes during newline.

The only real benefit I see to having this feature in core is convenience,
built-in support for coloring, and perhaps better integration with forensic
logging. I'm -0 on this feature because I don't see a compelling need for
it at this time.
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