provenance replay from q2view

[ChrisKeefe]

Addition Description During focus group testing of provenance replay, participants requested provenance replay be included in q2view.

Current Behavior Users have GUI access to the provenance graph, but no easy search access to captured provenance data, and no way of viewing e.g. the interface-specific command associated with an action. See #122.

Proposed Behavior Users could click a button on the provenance graph page to generate and download a script or reproducibility package representing the analysis. Alternately, replay scripts could be generated by default, and this functionality could be included in a separate tab (e.g. with a selector for target interface and a download button.

Comments Many challenges exist here:

• According to @ebolyen, this would probably require a rewrite/fork of provenance replay in Rust, which could be compiled to WASM.
• usage drivers for this platform would likely need to be decoupled from QIIME 2 entirely, and tooling to support version-specific plugin, action, and parameter-name checking doesn't exist outside of the Plugin Manager. Successful replay would require either this kind of tooling, or a relatively comprehensive solution for managing computing environments during replay (e.g. https://github.com/ChrisKeefe/provenance_py/issues/78), so that no name checking was required.
• q2view currently supports the viewing of single artifacts only. In order to get full value out of provenance replay, support for visualizing trees representing multiple artifacts would probably be required.

[ebolyen]

It's possible Python will run well enough in WASM to do this someday.

[ebolyen]

Until then, this seems out of scope.