Mission Support Collaboration Improvements

• Project description:

  mscolab or "Mission Support Collaboration", is a collaborative platform to use MSS. Some of the important features which mscolab lacks, (which are to be worked with, through the summer)

• There isn't a good admin interface to handle users. @joernu, one of the users and maintainers of MSS pointed out that there can be 100 odd users with same permission to be inserted. As of now, there is a text-box which takes one user at a time. This has to be improved upon, and a new Qt window for administration purpose is to be developed.

• There are two modes in mscolab, autosave On and autosave Off.

  • When autosave is on, all the changes are synced with a central server, and all the users collaborating gets notified of this change, and their local flightpath also changes to accommodate the new change.
  • When autosave is off, the user should ideally be allowed to edit a local copy of this project. This feature hasn't been developed yet.
  • It poses some difficulty as to how should the VCS be coupled with local development, and how are the merge conflicts going to be handled

• The Version Control System for flightpath data is linear, which means say if there are commits C1, C2, C3, C4, made to a file. If we want to checkout to C1 and apply changes of C3 alone, it isn't possible. With packages like GeoGig/alternatives, which supports branches, merge, etc., we need to make a VCS which truly supports simultaneous development.

• The chat feature needs an improvement, to support Markdown editing, deleting messages etc.

• Skills: Python, Git

• Difficulty level: medium

• Related Readings/Links:

  • https://bitbucket.org/wxmetvis/mss/wiki/Mscolab:%20Collaborative%20editing%20of%20flight%20path%20in%20real-time%20-%20GSoC19

• Potential mentors: shivashispadhi@gmail.com, rb.proj@gmail.com