Improved control of verbosity

[anntzer]

What's the problem this feature will solve?

It would be nice if pip allowed separate control of verbosity of searching/downloading a package, and building it.

Specifically, when developing packages with complex builds, I find it useful to have the output of setup.py build being displayed (not just the spinner); but, if the package also has a lot of versions already present on PyPI, the list of links that gets displayed during the download phase can be ridiculously long.

Describe the solution you'd like

Currently, pip download --no-cache-dir --no-binary=:all: --verbose matplotlib in a clean venv (for example) displays many screenfuls of candidate download links, before proceeding to displaying the build itself.

Perhaps something like --verbose-build could indicate "please display the build output, but not the candidate download links" (the latter would be controlled by e.g. --verbose-download, and --verbose would switch both on).

Or the output of the verbose download could be shortened to not display the full links (if from PyPI, they contain (twice!) the long hashes and twice the version info, e.g. replacing

    Found link https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/ec/ed/46b835da53b7ed05bd4c6cae293f13ec26e877d2e490a53a709915a9dcb7/matplotlib-2.2.2.tar.gz#sha256=4dc7ef528aad21f22be85e95725234c5178c0f938e2228ca76640e5e84d8cde8 (from https://pypi.org/simple/matplotlib/), version: 2.2.2

by

    From https://pypi.python.org/simple/matplotlib:  (repeated only once for all links)
      Found link https://files.pythonhosted.org/.../matplotlib-2.2.2.tar.gz

(shortening the middle part to an ellipsis, dropping the #sha256= fragment, and the redundant version number). (Again, this option may be controllable by e.g. --verbose-download=full|short|....)

Alternative Solutions

See above for multiple suggestions.

Additional context

N/A

[pradyunsg]

There's another idea of more drastically reworking pip's output: #4649.

I do think that "show me build output but not the other stuff" is a reasonable request.

[pradyunsg]

To be clear, I don't think this has to be done with that change, but I do think it'd be cleaner to do them together. :)

[pradyunsg]

We've since cleaned up the verbosity levels, and -v does what the user wants here.