usage numbers for macports vs. homebrew?

[Clemens Lang]

> * More use of ANSI colors in the log messages (used to distinguish the start
> of each port, etc., and maybe with different colors for different phases)…
> all tunable, of course, for those who don’t like color.

We should also take a look at `port search', which can currently produce enormous amounts of output. Rather than printing more than, say, 10 lines, we should just print the port names in columns like homebrew does.

> * A careful review of what we emit, and when (we don’t clearly distinguish
> when a port was loaded from a build-bot vs built by hand, unless you know
> what to look for), etc.

Agreed. We should also remove some of the clean messages that might be unexpected (when the thing that really gets cleaned is the port loaded from the registry, i.e. when uninstalling).

> * Spinning ANSI indicators during loading operations, etc, where we can. We
> could do this in loading, activation, etc. The hardest time would likely be
> in building and configuring, where we don’t have any hooks back from the
> build.

What you probably haven't seen because most servers to HTTP/1.1: The progress bar actually comes in a progress indicator variant aswell that can be used for that. Activation is certainly on my todo list of things to display a progress bar for. For configure/build/etc I was thinking about writing simple parsers for the formats emitted by some build systems that give progress info (e.g., cmake, ninja).
We might even try to estimate progress using the number of lines printed and a web-based database of the number of lines generated during build/configure/destroot of a port. It might be erratic, but it would still give *some* indication of the duration of the build.
Also, we really need to work on the dependency calculation stuff to print a plan of action before starting and print progress information (building port x of y) while building.

> Yeah, in the end it’s all just glitz and glitter, unfortunately, but it does
> lead to perception…

Yeah, apparently people call that being user-friendly. Well, if that's the case, let's do that.

-- 
Clemens Lang