[gentoo-dev] [RFC] Portage einfo, elog... output format change

["Michał Górny" <mgorny@gentoo.org>]

Hi, everyone.

I know I'm going to regret asking this... but I've prepared a change to
the Portage output format and I think it asks for a wider discussion
than internally in Portage team.

The primary problem with the current output format is that different
kinds of messages differ only in color.  This makes them
indistinguishable without colors and hard to grep.  ago's been asking
for a better way to grep for QA warnings and this is pretty much what
motivated me to do this.

The proposed new format distinguished message types both using colors
and strings.  This is roughly inspired by Xorg logs.  For example,
instead of:

 * some message
 * other message
 * hell if i know what this is

You get:

[WW] some message
[EE] other message
[QA] hell if i know what this is

I've also added more colors to explicitly distinguish einfo from elog,
and ewarn from eqawarn.  Then, I've replaced most of '>>>' and '!!!'
used by Portage with four-character versions to keep messages aligned. 
The 'zings' used for merging files remain three-character, so now it's
easily possible to distinguish messages from installed file list.

The PR doing this is: https://github.com/gentoo/portage/pull/759

Example screenshot:
https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/110765/135119090-16e9599d-1b0f-41b8-a965-a55577183ffd.png

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny