Suggestion: Remove verbose extraction

[Irchh]

Is there any reason to keep verbose mode on when extracting? As far as I'm concerned it just makes it take longer than it should.

[richfelker]

Not in particular, but it's just part of a general principle of not hiding visual progress indication.

I just measured and the time difference is miniscule here, 29.0s vs 27.7s. If it's slow for you, the slowness is probably a bad terminal that renders synchronously and blocks while rendering (all the gnome-vte based ones) and redirecting the whole build to a file or using a better terminal would make a huge difference compared to just saving time at extraction.

[Irchh]

Seems likely, but in my case it's probably because I'm using WSL. It's not exactly fast...

[Calinou]

I think it would make more sense to just print a message when extraction has started and finished. Alternatively, we could make the script print a dot (.) with no line break at the end for every file extracted, so that progress would still be visible somehow.

[rofl0r]

you could simply use tar xf instead of tar xvf, @Calinou

[Calinou]

@rofl0r That can be done too, but I was answering @richfelker's concern about hiding progress (especially on slow machines).

[Irchh]

So piping stdout into some program that counts lines and prints a dot for each one? Something like this: tar -xvf gcc-8.3.0.tar.bz2 | awk '{printf "."}' would propably be fine then, and also wouldn't slow down because of 'bad' terminals like the gnome-based ones. With big codebases like gcc, only printing every 30+ files would probably be a good idea: tar -xvf gcc-8.3.0.tar.bz2 | awk '{if(NR%30==0)printf "."}'

(I have no idea what this will do to overall performance, but I can't imagine it doing much. I am not even close to any linux machine at the moment, so I can't test this)

[llamasoft]

I don't think this is a speed issue but a noise issue. When you build musl-cross-make, the first 125 thousand lines of output are just from extracting archives. That's not meaningful information, that's just ~10MB of noise.

I would suggest removing the verbose flag from all tar commands.
If users really want to watch files be unpacked, they can use the TAR_OPTIONS environment variable to re-insert the verbose flag.