If destdir is a relative path, and/or if destdir is provided in the BUILD file, then sometimes the user does not know where the files are installed to. For a better UI, I would like to see this:

$ bazel run //package:my_install
Files are installed to /path/to/installed/dir!

There are a few difficulties / issues that has not been settled.

1. The default log level is warning. However, the log Files are installed to /path/to/installed/dir! appears to be best categorized as an INFO log.
2. If the user specified destdir in the command line, we might not want to print anything for brevity.

Hence, I propose the following changes:

• The default log level for install.py.tpl should be INFO. All existing logs (CHDIR, CHOWN, etc.) are moved to logging.debug() level. Then make the log level adjust with the following:

      if args.quiet:
        logging.getLogger().setLevel(logging.WARNING)
    elif loudness == 0:
        logging.getLogger().setLevel(logging.INFO)
    elif loudness == 1:
        logging.getLogger().setLevel(logging.DEBUG)
  

  That is:

  • if -q only print warning/error (there are none of these logs now)
  • by default print info
  • if -v print debug level logs
    With these two changes, the current command-line API is preserved (-v prints the logs)

• If destdir is relative, OR if --destdir is not specified in the command line, then print Files are installed to /path/to/installed/dir! at the INFO level. This covers the following cases:

  • If the user did not provide --destdir in the command line, we fall back to the value in BUILD file, so we print the value to tell the user where the file goes.
  • If the user did provide a --diestdir but it is relative, we also print the value because the user might not know that it is below BUILD_WORKSPACE_DIRECTORY.

Please let me know if these changes are acceptable. If so I'll make a pull request for this. Thanks!