bug#58375: Installer does not show what is being downloaded

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello!

Josselin Poiret <dev@jpoiret.xyz> skribis:

> Julien Lepiller <julien@lepiller.eu> writes:
>> I installed Guix on a new drive, so I tried the installer from the latest 
>> image. After reviewing the system config, the installer goes to a black 
>> screen where guix output is shown. Although I can see messages about 
>> substitutes being updated, and how much will be downloaded, all download 
>> lines are replaced with a seemingly random number of dots:
>>
>> substitute: mise à jour des substituts depuis «…»... 100.0 %
>> 4.5 Mo seront téléchargés.
>> .
>> ...
>> .
>> .
>> ......
>>
>> Maybe this is related to the translation?
>
> I agree that this does look pretty bad, but this is because we capture
> the guix command output to a log file so that we're able to include it
> in the installer dump if anything goes wrong.  Guix detects it's not
> talking directly to a terminal and so doesn't try to use terminal
> specific escape codes to display the download progress.  I don't know
> how we could improve on that front though, since in general capturing
> the guix command output helps with debugging issues.

This is a duplicate of <https://issues.guix.gnu.org/55360>, marked as
important.

I think capturing all the output as-is is overkill; one option I
suggested in the bug report above is to syslog specific events of
interest during ‘guix system init’.

Thoughts?

Ludo’.