Logging mixed up with asynchronous tasks

[yocontra]

3rd party modules that log progressively/asynchronously will get stuff mixed in from other tasks

This will have to be fixed at the plugin level or we could do some trickery at the task level

[ClaudioAlbertin]

I'd like to see gulp itself handling this. It would mean that it automatically works for all plugins and that it could do it in a clean, consistent and configurable manner.

Another argument for this is that many plugins are only very thin wrappers for other libraries, and that handling this themselves would make them unnecessarily more complex, and in this case the wrapped libraries themselves are responsible for logging to the console, the plugin can't do more about it than gulp itself could.

I haven't really looked into possible solutions yet, but the first thing that comes to my mind is replacing the methods of interest from console with custom implementations, admittedly not a very clean approach. If some plugins used this method however, their workarounds for this problem might interfere and cause more problems than they solve.

Libraries such as mocha execute a task that can take anything from a fraction of a second to a couple of minutes or even hours to complete. In the case of mocha, it makes a lot of sense to log its status continuously.
Other libraries such as jshint often don't require continuous logging, and it might be better suited to output their logs all at once, while no other tasks are logging.
A third possible option could be that the logs aren't of any interest at all. Although that might rarely be the case, I'd still suggest having this as an option.
The options are continuous logging, serial logging and no logging, which should be possible to be set at least on a task, maybe even on a .pipe() level.

However, this solution introduces a lot of complexity for a more or less simple problem. I'm not sure if it's worth it, although I don't consider wanting to have clean logs to be an edge case. Having a simple way of running tasks serially might not be the ideal solution for this specific issue, but a simpler and more generally applicable one than introducing a complex and confusing system to configure logging behaviour.

[mgcrea]

Not sure if this is strictly related (looks like it), but in my case it looks like gulp.log is having an issue. Every log is fired right away, and the global task logs should wrap others imo.

gulp.task('build', ['clean:dist', 'templates:dist', 'scripts:dist']);

$ time gulp build
[gulp] Using gulpfile /Users/olivier/Dropbox/Projects/angular-strap/gulpfile.js
[gulp] Starting 'clean:dist'...
[gulp] Finished 'clean:dist' after 4.25 ms
[gulp] Starting 'templates:dist'...
[gulp] Finished 'templates:dist' after 7.1 ms
[gulp] Starting 'scripts:dist'...
[gulp] Finished 'scripts:dist' after 2.34 ms
[gulp] Starting 'build'...
[gulp] Finished 'build' after 4.77 μs

real    0m5.041s
user    0m4.915s
sys 0m0.173s

I'm expecting it to be something like:

$ time gulp build
[gulp] Using gulpfile /Users/olivier/Dropbox/Projects/angular-strap/gulpfile.js
[gulp] Starting 'build'...
[gulp] Starting 'clean:dist'...
[gulp] Starting 'templates:dist'...
[gulp] Starting 'scripts:dist'...
[gulp] Finished 'clean:dist' after 4.25 ms
[gulp] Finished 'templates:dist' after 2.1 s
[gulp] Finished 'scripts:dist' after 2.34 s
[gulp] Finished 'build' after 5.041s

real    0m5.041s
user    0m4.915s
sys 0m0.173s

[chall8908]

I wouldn't have expected the second log at all. It implies that the other tasks were started after the task you ran started, which isn't the case at all.

To be clear, when I say "started" I mean that the function you passed in has begun executing. I would expect an output like the second if you manually call other tasks within a single task.

[yocontra]

Just to keep everyone updated, we are completely replacing the logging and task system in gulp 4.0 so we will make sure this is fixed then

[phated]

Note: this will only be handled when logging is done through gulp-util.log (soon to be gulplog)

[phated]

Ref #1208

[kahlil]

Since new logging is done, how does this issue need to be addressed?

[phated]

@kahlil I'm not sure how this would be tackled. Any ideas?

[phated]

Deferring to gulp-cli 1.2.0

[phated]

Moved to gulpjs/gulp-cli#72 - Closing.