`cabal-validate`: Output is too verbose and not verbose enough

[9999years]

./validate.sh starts by printing 93 lines of output (runtime configuration, tool and compiler versions, the names and versions of all transitive dependencies and local packages) before anything gets built. This is regardless of whether or not --verbose is passed.

Then, unless you pass --verbose, it hides the cabal build output! A clean build can take several minutes, so it's annoying to have no indication of how close it is to being done or what it's doing.

Then, regardless of if --verbose is passed, test suites won't output any indication that they've run a test! This is because the default Tasty arguments include --hide-successes, there's no --no-hide-successes option, and ./validate.sh --tasty-arg ... can only add arguments, not replace the default ones.

Proposal:

• print-config, print-tool-versions, and the full build plan output (currently inseparable from the build step) should be hidden by default, unless --verbose is given.
  • If we want, we could write this information to a file somewhere to preserve it.
• cabal build output should be shown by default. Maybe a --quiet option could be added to hide it?
• --verbose should toggle --hide-successes for test suites.

[geekosaur]

Small suggestion: if stdout isn't a tty, maybe output GitHub Actions grouping that can be collapsed or expanded by the viewer instead of the ANSI escapes. Then we can make everything verbose in CI without overwhelming people trying to go through the log.

[9999years]

That's a great idea, but let's push it to another PR. I'm not sure what it'll require. I'd appreciate if you could file an issue for it as well.

[geekosaur]

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