GPanel - GScan standalone replacement

[oliver-sanders]

Discussed but not actually recorded (as far as I can see).

The Issue

A common use case for the Cylc7 GScan and GPanel tools is to provide a quick at-a-glance overview of ones running suites. GPanel runs in the Gnome toolbar, users often set GScan to be "always on top" and or "always on visible workspace" to serve a similar function.

More Context

For context users often:

• Spin up multiple Rose Stem test suites
• Develop multiple suites simultaneously.

...and want to monitor for failures.

Email notifications are good but not quite good enough, being able to quickly click through to the GUI is desirable (note Cylc emails could provide links to the GUI in future).

The old GPanel was surprisingly popular amongst a small number of people, the idea of having a single icon always visible on the screen which changes if anything goes wrong (e.g. task failure, suite stall, etc) has its merits when you are working with many suites.

Solutions

1. Desktop notifications with links through to the GUI might solve a lot of requirements.

   For most use cases there isn't actually a desire to see all suites, just be made aware of issues.

2. A simple more direct replacement would be to make the GScan replacement in the new GUI accessible by it's own dedicated URL i.e. a /gscan page.

   This would be almost as light-weight as the original GScan minus the URL bar etc. Users could potentially wrap it in a Firefox profile, Electron app or whatever. Should be easy.

3. A single "status" icon i.e. /status page which on-click opens up a clickable list of warnings which could potentially be wrapped into a Gnome widget or whatever.

4. Others?

See also the GScan issue #139

[hjoliver]

We should be able to do all of 1-3 pretty easily.