Add ability to determine state of the console
rjbell4 opened this issue · comments
Gradle internally knows whether or not the client is connected to a TTY, and (when the console has a default value of auto) determines whether to use a rich or plain console. This information can be useful to tasks, but it is not available, even (as far as I can tell) via internal calls or "sneaky methods" (like looking in /proc at the parent process), as the tasks execute in the Gradle daemon, separate from the client process.
Expected Behavior
An API available to tasks can report either whether a plain or rich console is being used (preferred), or whether or not stdout on the client is a TTY (second choice).
Current Behavior
This information is not available.
Context
I want to invoked a process in a task, and would like the invocation of this process to reflect whether the console is "rich", or not. For example, imagine a task that executes a script that has it's own --plain or --ansi arguments. That script cannot determine anything with a useful default using isatty(). The best thing would be to continue the same style of output that Gradle already determined was appropriate.
What happens if you force the tool you're invoking to use its "rich" output and Gradle's running with --console=plain? Is the output mixed?
@big-guy The idea here is that if Gradle determined the console should be plain (either because the user explicitly requested it, or because it was auto and Gradle determined that plain was necessary/appropriate), but then the tool is specifically told to use it's equivalent of "rich" content, then yes -- Gradle output will be plain, but the tool will output ANSI sequences, etc. This could undesirably put ANSI escape codes into log files, etc.
But that's essentially what we are doing to handle it right now -- invoke the tool explicitly to use rich output by default, and provide a separate toggle (project property, etc.) to change how the tool (or any other such tool) is invoked. Obviously, having a toggle for Gradle itself and a toggle for sub-tools is undesirable; it would be preferable to just make the invocation of the tools "match" Gradle. But to enable that, we need to be able to determine the style of the Gradle output programmatically.
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