bug#41409: “guix pull” should show a progress bar for channel updates

[zimoun]

On Thu, 21 May 2020 at 22:09, Ricardo Wurmus <address@hidden> wrote:

> It can take several seconds or even over a few minutes when fetching
> from multiple channels.  For what it’s worth I got annoyed waiting for
> “guix pull” on ci.guix.gnu.org, which has a pretty decent network
> connection (even though users on the outside cannot see it this way due
> to the firewall).

Wow! Few minutes.  To me, each channel (Gitlab, GitHub, etc.)  takes a
couple of seconds -- even with a poor Wifi connection -- and the
longest is Guix from Savannah: and "slow" as everything under gnu.org.
I feel much more frustrated by "Computing Guix derivation" which takes
ages on my machine and I never know if the computations are at 20% or
80% or whatever.
And I never pull on my laptop the current HEAD of master otherwise I
am waiting between 10 and 30 minutes building all the derivations
because they are not substituable yet; well I pull 1 or 2 weeks
behind.

Well, a spinner for the Git updating part could improve use cases:
first pull, long period between 2 pulls, firewall, etc..
On the other hand, an European mirror of guix.git could help too, IMHO.

Cheers,
simon