When using SourceTree to clone a git repository, SourceTree displays a dialog with a full progress bar and a few lines of text, but then no feedback on the progress (or lack thereof) of the operation.

Sample text:

git -c filter.lfs.smudge= -c filter.lfs.required=false -c diff.mnemonicprefix=false -c core.quotepath=false -c credential.helper=sourcetree clone --branch master <source URI> <checkout path>
Cloning into '<checkout path>'...
warning: templates not found /usr/local/git/share/git-core/templates
<no feedback>

I just had a co-worker, who normally uses another source control tool, make a fresh clone of the repository. We started the clone, then sat there staring at the dialog, unsure if there was a problem contacting the server (maybe it failed to display the error?), if the operation was in progress (how far? or did it start and then fail?), if the operation had succeeded, or what. We did look in the target directory, but found no files, not even a .git directory, so we thought something had gone wrong and tried it again. The second time, we let it sit for several minutes and it did complete.

The expected behavior would be to have some sort of progress indicator. The best would be to have a single progress bar that fills up once. (The dialog currently contains a progress bar, but it fills up immediately, long before the operation completes.) IIRC git can tell you the size of the repo and can report the amount of data transferred, so that could be part of the progress, and then any post-transfer work would fill it up the rest of the way. If that’s too hard, it would be useful to at least have a text field that gets updated with the current step of the operation (i.e. “git: downloading hunk 2349cb…”). The changing text would give the user visual feedback that something is still happening. If you can’t do those, an indefinite progress indicator would be better than nothing. In any case, the indicator should be tied to the activity of the operation.

The key phrase there is “tied to the activity”—I don’t want an indicator that updates completely independently of the operation. In other words, if the operation doesn’t make progress (the DNS lookup is taking several seconds, git is connected to the server but data transfer is super-slow, etc.), the indicator should stop updating. If you spawn off git as another process and that process crashes, SourceTree should recognize that and display an error message. It should be clear that an operation is still active so that the user knows that it hasn’t ended, either cleanly or due to an error.