varenius / salsa

Code developed for the 2.3m radio telescopes SALSA in Onsala, Sweden
MIT License
16 stars 6 forks source link

UI: No version information in controller window #67

Open maltesk opened 2 years ago

maltesk commented 2 years ago

There's no program version information (e.g. an About option) in the SALSA user interface.

When I start the SALSA controller app, I want to find version information for reporting faults. There's no version information in the UI.

Tested on Brage 2021-09-01

varenius commented 2 years ago

This is simple in theory but a little more work in practice. The SALSA software lives in github, so the relevant tagging is not "version" but instead "github commit ID". This can be ready by the python code at runtime, and put in the control window. However, currently the SALSA system is setup so that the executables are copied from the github repo, not living within it. The reason for this was for the executable folder not having to deal with all extra stuff such as PDF documentation etc.

The paths for the locations for the executable are hence different from the folder structure that would be if the github repo was just downloaded and used as source directly. This is not a problem, but it is a bit of work to ensure the various different bits of the system work together. For example, new users get accounts created with a desktop shortcut to SALSA. This shortcut must also be ensured to have the correct path, if this changes.

Generally, issues have always been reported to "the current version", and things are never "fixed" without being put into the current excecutables. So this has not been needed.

In my view, the only time this feature would be needed would be if users are running a different version than the latest "main" branch of the repo. This should in principle never happen, and thus version information in the reports are somewhat redundant. The date on when the problem was found should be sufficient.

We could still include a version tag, but then we should decide on: where should this appear in the UI?