Actions composed of multiple tullia tasks have confusing log output

[michaelpj]

This is the log output from an action that has two tullia tasks that run in sequence. It's difficult to identify where one ends and the other begins. It's also not obvious that there are multiple things running in this action full stop. This is a problem since all the github statuses link to just the page for the action, making it difficult to find the logs for the actual task in question.

This could be improved in the short term by just having some very clear logging like:

INFO: Running tullia task plutus/ci
INFO: Running tullia task dependencies for plutus/ci
INFO: Starting tullia task X
...
INFO: Completed tullia task X
...
INFO: Dependencies for tullia task Y completed
INFO: Starting tullia task Y
...

Alternatively, we could take inspiration from the way the new Nix CLI logs things, and include the task name as a prefix in front of the log lines,

foo.bar> Doing something

Even better would be to have multiple log output panes for the different tasks, or dividers, like github actions does when you have multiple steps in a workflow.

[michaelpj]

Confusingly, it even looks like Cicero has the concepts for this: we have a "task group" called tullia and a "task" called nomad, but everything is in that one task instead of being split out. Perhaps this is an artifact of how our CI tasks are being setup, but then it seems like a major UI problem with that approach.

[dermetfan]

This is because all Tullia tasks are run in sequence in a single Nomad task. Those are different things. The UI shows Nomad tasks. Cicero doesn't know anything about Tullia.

We do want to make it easier to generate separate Nomad tasks for each Tullia task using the Tullia NixOS module.

That said, the entire UI will likely be rewritten and separated as its own application at some point.

[michaelpj]

As a user of the CI system that we're producing... I don't know or care about most of that. It also doesn't match up with the picture we present via the Github statuses. It looks like we have independent statuses... but they all link to the same place and are hard to interpret!

[dermetfan]

This is a tullia issue because cicero cannot do much about this except a better UI. The proper solution would be for tullia to generate multiple (nomad) tasks which would then be shown separately, even in cicero's current UI.