portupgrade-devel: 2 feature requests

[Matthew D. Fuller]

On Thu, Feb 14, 2008 at 01:46:08PM -0800 I heard the voice of
Doug Barton, and lo! it spake thus:
> 
> ... and I repeat my thesis that what you're really interested in is
> how much time is left, not how many ports are left to build, and no
> tool is going to be able to tell you that.

No, but a tool can give me a good guess by telling me what's to do.
I've often wished I could tell portupgrade to write a file in /tmp
with a summary list of what it's going to do in order, with pointers
to what happened.  So, I could cat /tmp/foo at any time, and see
something vaguely like:

-------
www/apache22             DONE
lang/php5                DONE
lang/perl                FAILED
security/mhash           Currently Building
emulators/mtools
www/firefox
x11-servers/xorg-server
-------

The x/y it shows in argv is vaguely useful, and it DOES gives a little
"X total, Y done, Z ignored, A failed" list before each build (at
least, with -v, which I always have on), but that doesn't tell me
what's left to do, what's already done, what failed, etc.  And it
doesn't tell me anything unless I happen to be watching the terminal
at just the right time, and read quick before it scrolls off.  I have
to wait 'till the end for any details that.

Rewriting a file at the beginning of each build that I could cat WOULD
tell me a lot, and I could start looking ahead of time at what failed
(perl usually fails, for instance, because I mount / readonly, and it
tries to rewrite make.conf), or have some idea how much is left to do
just by my general knowledge of what things build fast and which take
ages.


(of course, I say portupgrade because I use portupgrade, but
portmaster growing that would be a reason to look more closely at
switching   ;)

-- 
Matthew Fuller     (MF4839)   |  fullermd at over-yonder.net
Systems/Network Administrator |  http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/
           On the Internet, nobody can hear you scream.