Discover shared projects

[johrstrom]

If someone were to create a project in a shared space, other users need a way to discover this project.

I'm thinking the only way to do this is brute force search over every path.

shared_projects_paths:
  - /fs/project

Then users in project A can find /fs/project/A/my-cool-project and so on. Note there's got to be a some sort of convention here where the the search paths are #{shared_projects_path}/<UNIX group ID>/<project> like we have at OSC.

[harshit-soora]

I feel looking for convention will be difficult to scale, for example at UMD we have /home/<user>/scratch directory for shared space which is totally different.

One suggestion if we get the group info from the user who is creating the project. This can be done after a user selects whether or not the project is opted to be shared on project creation form.
I believe including group info on Select Path option of same form will also provide visibility/example to new users.

Now we can associate a user back to a list of groups(via groups command) of which he/she is part of. Then we can query out path of all those groups (as we have a group field associated with each project inside model project.rb)

[johrstrom]

We know the current users UNIX groups. But not all unix groups map to an HPC accounting group.

ondemand/apps/dashboard/lib/current_user.rb

Line 39 in adc2495

def group_names

Now we can associate a user back to a list of groups(via groups command) of which he/she is part of. Then we can query out path of all those groups (as we have a group field associated with each project inside model project.rb)

I don't know how you turn the unix group PZS0714 into /fs/ess/project/PZS0714/<project im looking for> without a convention.

[harshit-soora]

I don't know how you turn the unix group PZS0714 into /fs/ess/project/PZS0714/<project im looking for> without a convention.

We can use the .project_lookup table, instead of simply having all the project paths, we can have group info : project path. Thus just need to populate the projects (after selecting paths from this lookup table) of which groups the user is part of.

But I understand your question now -- We will require some shared location to store this project_lookup, to make sure it is visible to all users else it will be specific to the current user who is creating the shared project.

Thus convention becomes an essential part to solve this problem.

[johrstrom]

But I understand your question now -- We will require some shared location to store this project_lookup, to make sure it is visible to all users else it will be specific to the current user who is creating the shared project.

I don't know about multiple editors to the .project_lookup - this file contains your own private projects as well. And if it's editable by other folks, I guess you're just left to 🙏 someone else doesn't delete/corrupt it?