MNT: skip processing device if branches are not specified

tangkong commented 5 months ago

Description

Remove hard failure when branches aren't specified for a lightpath-active (lightpath=true) device. Instead, we just ignore the device.
Trim beamline device lists before BeamPath creation. This allows a user to grab an accurate beam path without instantiating the devices. (as in hutch-python)
- BeamPath.split() is thus now no longer used, but is likely a useful method for later use
  Motivation and Context
  
  jira (soft fail on invalid device) jira (lazy trim)

How Has This Been Tested?

interactively, with test suite.

(Testing with xpppython now)

Where Has This Been Documented?

This PR, jira ticket

tangkong commented 5 months ago

I was looking at fixing that other issue, though it's a little more finicky. Should hopefully be in today

tangkong commented 5 months ago

I think this is good to be reviewed now. The changes here make lightpath more consistent. Now whenever you access a path, it will include only the items defined in its config up until the specified endpoint.

However, it doesn't actually limit the number of devices hutch python loads, in some cases. I'll go into more details in the JIRA ticket. If we do want to minimize loading, this first step is necessary

pcdshub / lightpath