SBT is silent on first run looking like it's broken

We just got the following report on the Play mailing list

On my end, running the command “activator ui” took 10 minutes, without any indication it was doing anything. To be honest, I tried it a few times before and just closed the console window. But finally, as I was typing this it opened up a new tab in the background. The initial usability of this isn’t ideal, especially considering there’s no context as to what to expect: That it’ll churn as long as it takes without indicators and then at some point open a browser tab. Second run was faster, but still about a 1min wait time.

I’ve seen this as well. Every time someone joins our company and sets up a new computer we get this report.

If you blast away your ivy repo I’m guessing you’ll see this behavior. I think the issue here is that SBT tells you when it’s fetching jars for your project, but it probably doesn’t tell you when it’s fetching jars for your SBT plugins. So on first run, you type sbt and it downloads all the play plugins, sbt-web plugins, etc. and it takes a long time and meanwhile the user doesn’t know what’s happening and why their SBT console isn’t coming up. They’ll often kill SBT at this point and start it again, which causes it to resume the download, but still look like it’s hanging. Folks will often kill it again and just give up at this point

We should really fix this because it’s really discouraging to new comers

[eed3si9n]

@havocp We might be able to suspend all JAR download during Ivy resolution, and download everything in parallel off a final list. Then we do have real progress bar. Another quick fix may be:

println("JAR download process initiating... May take hours if you live in Asia or Australia.")

[dwijnand]

In terms of “SBT is silent on first run looking like it’s broken”, this has been mitigated somewhat by a small change in the messaging.

https://github.com/sbt/launcher/pull/27