I wonder if there is a helper function one could write that would allow you to write this sequence each time you need a progress indicator:

progress.start()
defer progress.stop()
slowOperation()

Ideally it should work correctly even when the call sequence is start1 start2 stop2 stop1 so that you can use the above sequence of statements twice within a function that has two slow operations.

I would need to test how two spinners would interact with each other. I did initially have something like this:

	var repository *api.Repository
	if err := a.perform("Fetching repository", func() error {
		repository, err = a.apiClient.GetRepository(ctx, repo)
		return err
	}); err != nil {
		return fmt.Errorf("error getting repository: %w", err)
	}

But I didn't want to spread a.perform all over the place with vars everywhere. There's a tradeoff for sure.

Yeah, we definitely don't want to go that route. Control flow abstraction is not one of Go's strengths.

I was imagining the helper would maintain an underlying spinner and a stack of unstopped starts, and would take care of calling underlying.stop in between two nested calls to outer.start; similarly, after a call to outer.stop, it would use underlying.start to restart the last unstopped task.

I see... that sounds nice, having to manage the stop across possible error returns is tedious. Perhaps it's something we can consider for gh as a whole since the pattern I'm using here it's used heavily everywhere else. Likely not going to happen in this PR though 😄