If, for whatever reason, chain is not syncing, there is no indication what's wrong with app

[particularly7]

Windows 10.

My chain is not syncing on tesnet v3. Apart from this issue itself which is core related? ..There should be an indication when the chain doesn't or can't sync if this ever occurs. The syncing notification on the bottom left only pops up when the chain starts to actually sync. It should however be displayed straight away even when syncing has not started yet, or at least, there should be some indication that the app is not functioning due to the syncing process not having started yet. This seems rather important to me before an official mainnet release, as i have had syncing issues in the past and this seems to be a persistent issue on my side. A new user is completely in the dark if this is happening

[zaSmilingIdiot]

There was a different issue mentioned elsewhere (I thought it was originally reported on Github but cannot seem to find the source of it right now) that this is similar to: on first startup the blockheaders are synced and the syncing status doesn't display or indicate that syncing is happening.

This is something that can be addressed as part of some updates intended for release in the next minor version or 2, ie: v3.1 or v3.2 for example. The general idea is to modify the way PD interacts with starting/stopping core, and in so doing we can run different checks over what core is doing on startup and display this type of syncing information in a useful way.

However, keep in mind that this is not a simple quick fix "display-an-indicator-and-be-done" type of situation. As such, I dont think this merits a delay to the v3.0 mainnet release: core not syncing is a symptom of something wrong (eg: no network connection, too few peers, problematic configuration, etc), and determining those issues is not something trivial to resolve. For example, consider that you don't have a network connection or no peers: core is unable to connect to peers to know that a new block has been received, so there is no syncing happening, but if the chain was fully synced at the time of network loss, then its technically up-to-date.
That being a somewhat simple example, there are more complex situations to consider. In general, for the current v3.0 release, there is sufficient information and tooling available for the user to be able to troubleshoot their setup if they so need to (aalong with multiple communication 'channels' to get help on if stuck). And in future releases of PD we'll get to providing additional guidance and feedback on sync status.