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labscript-suite-oldfinal1 / runmanager

runmanager is a graphical user interface (GUI) used to aid the compilation of labscript experiment scripts into hardware instructions to be executed on the hardware. Experiment parameters can be adjusted in the GUI, and lists of parameters can be used to create sequences of experiments, and scan over complex parameter spaces.
BSD 2-Clause "Simplified" License
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Copying global groups #43

Closed philipstarkey closed 7 years ago

philipstarkey commented 7 years ago

Original report (archived issue) by Jan Werkmann (Bitbucket: PhyNerd, GitHub: PhyNerd).

There should be a option to copy a group of globals at the press of a button.

philipstarkey commented 7 years ago

Original comment by Philip Starkey (Bitbucket: pstarkey, GitHub: philipstarkey).

Probably a good idea! In the meantime you can copy/paste groups with HDFView :)

philipstarkey commented 7 years ago

Original comment by Jan Werkmann (Bitbucket: PhyNerd, GitHub: PhyNerd).

Thats why the priority is minor. But the guys in the lab aren't all to happy with this xD

philipstarkey commented 7 years ago

Original comment by Philip Starkey (Bitbucket: pstarkey, GitHub: philipstarkey).

It sounds like your doing this often? Can I ask why you're doing it? We've probably only done this like 3 time in the 5-6 years we've been using runmanager so it would be good to understand more about the use case

philipstarkey commented 7 years ago

Original comment by Jan Werkmann (Bitbucket: PhyNerd, GitHub: PhyNerd).

We are currently restructuring our experiment and trying out lots of new things. Thats why we use this on a regular basis having a few configurations for each typ of experiment each differing in someway.

philipstarkey commented 7 years ago

Original comment by Philip Starkey (Bitbucket: pstarkey, GitHub: philipstarkey).

Makes sense! We should think about other features that would help get things started when designing new experiments. It's something we haven't done since the software matured so probably quite a few things we could do here to better support that part of the experiment lifecycle.

philipstarkey commented 7 years ago

Original comment by Jan Werkmann (Bitbucket: PhyNerd, GitHub: PhyNerd).

Well there are a lot of areas that could be improved upon not just restructuring experiments.

For example: Starting out BLACS is not launching until there is a connection table which you need to compile in runmanager and then rename and move .... This is not the best first impression. It would maybe be better to display the compile connection table window instead of a error message to "newbies".

Not to mention the lack of a good documentation if the APIs outside the code.

Whats is a good place to discuss this kind of stuff? As I think a issue for disscussing potential issues seems wrong.

philipstarkey commented 7 years ago

Original comment by Chris Billington (Bitbucket: cbillington, GitHub: chrisjbillington).

There's the mailing list! It's not very active but there's no reason it couldn't be.

A lot of these problems have clear solutions and it's just a matter of sufficient development effort to solve them. I'm hoping to help build tools that can help people help us, like documentation and test suites. Development has ramped up recently with help from people like you, who not only write code but also draw our attention to longstanding issues that maybe we have forgotten about, like how to first set up a connection table (since we don't do it often it's easy to forget). I think the future is bright, and that online sphinx documentation and automated testing on sandboxed fresh installs on a server somewhere for every pull request are not far off.

Perhaps atlassian JIRA, which we've been thinking about using for managing the project, has something like discussion forums that aren't "issues" but are better than email threads.

philipstarkey commented 7 years ago

Original comment by Jan Werkmann (Bitbucket: PhyNerd, GitHub: PhyNerd).

Yeah I joined that yesterday but I'm not really a fan of mailing lists.

Well the connection table thing is just something thats bugging me a lot as I've installed labscript at least 4 times in the last 2 months on various machines. The installer should also maybe get a current version of labscript?

JIRA seems really nice but I'm not sure we would be able to use it to it's fullest extend as it seems to be centered around scrum and/or agile development. I'm not confident everyone knows how these work(heck I'm not even sure I do). This would maybe even be more of a hurdle for people joining the development efforts than it would help. But if it provides something like a forum that would definitely help.

Also as you mentioned forgotten issues could you take a look at my remote worker (labscript-suite/labscript#28) stuff? I really think this solves a lot of problems for people using PCI cards or other limited intefaces/ports.

I'll try fixing this issue here in the next days anyway so spamming here should not be that bad.

philipstarkey commented 7 years ago

Original comment by Philip Starkey (Bitbucket: pstarkey, GitHub: philipstarkey).

@chrisjbillington FYI JIRA is bad because we'd have to pay per contributor (even for those just interacting with the issue tracker). Only the version of JIRA that you use if you're providing IT support (as in IT service desk kind of thing) doesn't charge you per user.

philipstarkey commented 7 years ago

Original comment by Jan Werkmann (Bitbucket: PhyNerd, GitHub: PhyNerd).

@philipstarkey if we apply here if I'm not misunderstanding it should be free.

philipstarkey commented 7 years ago

Original comment by Philip Starkey (Bitbucket: pstarkey, GitHub: philipstarkey).

Hmm, good find! I'll investigate.

Not that this is really the right place to discus this, but with respect to JIRA use, I think what we already do is considered "agile" and in terms of workflow, I think we already reasonably align with "kanban" (at least from 5 seconds of googling!)

Mainly JIRA is just a better issue tracker (I hope), and so we'd be able to better manage/categorise/allocate issues (I think). Right now it's a bit of a mess because we have issue trackers for each project and things either apply to more than one project or are completely mis-categorised (and you can't fix this with bitbucket!)

philipstarkey commented 7 years ago

Original comment by Jan Werkmann (Bitbucket: PhyNerd, GitHub: PhyNerd).

Feature added by pull request #11