Automated tests should show more feedback than a progress bar

[Marc Tardif]

Some automated tests might take a very long time to run. So, showing a progress bar during all that time would give no indication whether tests were being run or the application was simply stalled. Instead, it should be possible to provide feedback to the user by showing the stdout of the tests being run. This should be displayed either in the same scrollable area where questions were asked or in an optional xterm-like window like in gdebbi.

[Brendan Donegan (brendan-donegan)]

There should be a collapsible text field underneath the progress bar which gives a view to the stdout of the script. Some test will have to be enhanced to take advantage of this feature (e.g. stress, memory/check)

[Jeff Lane  (bladernr)]

Removing the milestone because we're way past checkbox 0.8 feature freeze :)

[Daniel Manrique (roadmr)]

Should be implemented in checkbox-gui, not in checkbox-legacy as it's a new feature.

[Zygmunt Krynicki (zyga)]

I've set this to plainbox and set the status to triaged. I have thought of a way to run new-style jobs that have richer capabilities to express their UI. Those would be a new 'plugin' (here probably 'textland') and the way we'd run such jobs would be different. PlainBox would become a textland server hosting a display made by another program in another process. That other process could them be written to a rough set of guidelines and use simple widgets like text gauges.

Alternatively we could offer tests a side channel to pass additional events across but I don't like that (smells like debconf) approach.

Ultimately this bug boils down to having good UI on both graphical tests (using a zoo of toolkits) and on command line tests (using nothing or textland as we go, maybe)