Users get confused by not seeing anything happening

[cperciva]

Like all good UNIX utilities, tarsnap runs quietly unless it has a reason to be noisy (e.g., an error occurred, or the user asked for verbosity). Unfortunately this is provoking a FAQ: "Tarsnap doesn't seem to be doing anything, did it hang?"

I think the solution to this might simply be better documentation, but I'm creating the issue here in case anyone wants to chime in with suggestions.

[gperciva]

I personally don't think it would be terrible if an abbreviated version of --print-stats happened automaticaly. Namely, something like:

$ tarsnap --dry-run -c ~/backup
tarsnap: Removing leading '/' from member names
                                       Total size  Compressed size
This archive                               2.7 MB           915 kB
New data                                   1.5 MB           9.7 kB

I figure there's no way that you would accept that, though. :|

Another option could be making -v imply --print-stats (or --print-short-stats for the above material?). I mean, -v by itself doesn't have any kind of "completed" message. Sure, experienced UNIX people know that the lack of an error message means that it completed (or they could even check echo $?), but not everybody knows that.

[cperciva]

Adding --print-stats wouldn't help. The problem is that people are pointing tarsnap at many GB of data, and seeing nothing happen, when in fact tarsnap is running smoothly uploading data. They think it got stuck because it hasn't output anything and hasn't exited either. Then they hit ^C.

[gperciva]

Hmm. What about a --upload-progress flag which printed how much data was uploaded (and perhaps also how much data was read from disk / in cache) ? As discussed previously, we can't tell them "uploaded 1.2 / 7.5 GB", but at least they could see "uploaded xyz MB" updating in realtime.

[shinnok]

Any progress parameter would be useful for the GUI too. I'd be happy to incorporate an extra piece of useful info along with the loading gif.

On the original FAQ, personally I have nothing against the command line client running silently by default. I think it works well like this in true allegiance to UNIX utils. Any command line user should be apt enough to check on its status on his own or ask for verbosity. How about also printing network progress on SIGINFO along with current file.

[zatricky]

I see isatty() is used elsewhere in the project. Not uncommon to use that to decide whether or not to print something useful.

[cperciva]

On 03/16/18 00:17, Brendan wrote: I see isatty() is used elsewhere in the project. Not uncommon to use that to decide whether or not to print something useful.

Hmm, that's an idea. We'd need to be careful though -- using isatty that way would risk severe confusion when people see output at the console and then can't figure out why it isn't showing up when they pipe tarsnap's output to another process... Colin Percival

[holmesworcester]

This is still worth doing! It confused me!

(Though this is a funny case where the open issue is its own solution.)