"juju status-history" doesn't include the concept of progress messages

[John A Meinel]

There are types of status messages that really only exist to give you information about something progressing. In a recent patch on Master, I added the ability to see the download progress of LXD containers. This is really nice for users that want to see what is taking so long for their instance to come up.
However, it now creates:
 downloading image: 1%
 downloading image: 2%
 downolading image: 3%
...
 downloading image: 100%

so 100 messages that are just telling you the same thing.
It would be better if we had some way to flag a Machine.SetInstanceStatus message as updating an earlier one. That would also prevent "update-status" messages from swamping the "juju status-history" output.

[Eric Snow (ericsnowcurrently)]

tl;dr good luck :)

FWIW, we ran into a similar situation with resources, tracking download progress of resources from the controller to the units. We considered using the status machinery as you've described because it would mostly re-use the existing framework. However, we opted to not go that route for exactly the reason you've described. Solving the problem of status-history spam was too heavy a lift for us given our schedule. (Ultimately we moved resource download progress over to "juju list-resources", but that's beside the point.) Instead we are tracking the download progress (of resources) separately, which is manageable since we can keep it all server-side.

All that said, I imagine it's a different story for LXD images (unless we are caching them on the controller like we do for resources).

Also note that if you are doing this client-side (e.g. in the uniter) then you are producing an API call for each of those status messages, right?

[Eric Snow (ericsnowcurrently)]

Ah, I see we're already considering caching images on the controller: https://github.com/juju/juju/pull/4755

[Anastasia (anastasia-macmood)]

Removing 2.1 milestone as we will not be addressing this issue in 2.1.

[Heather Lanigan (hmlanigan)]

I'm not sure which command "status-history" has been replaced with in juju 2.x.

If you use `juju status`, it's a one time output. Commonly `watch juju status` is used, or `juju status --watch <duration>`, and machine status messages are replaced.