Ingesting control change data

[samueljackson92]

Graham McArdle has provided a text file containg information about how shot settings were modified.

From the email chain with Graham:

there is a history.txt file that is continuously updated with info about edits made when PCS is running. I've assembled all the changes in the history of MAST into a file on my freia home drive ~gmcardle/mast_history.txt (it's too big for email attachment)

As I mentioned the other day, each of the shot setup files also record changes but they recursively repeat the history of shots that were restored. There are pros and cons of each here. The history file appears to be more robust and monotonic, but it also contains history of irrelevant changes made for fiddling about and running test shots (note that shot numbers in the 900000 range are test shots). If you specifically want to look at changes from one shot to the next you would get that from this history file, but if a shot is restored from an earlier shot you'd have to look back at that earlier shot to find what was done. Where this falls down at times is that we can also prepare a setup offline and restore the setup. In that case the change history of that prepared setup can't be found here but is embedded in the shot setup file.

I'm not entirely sure what you'd like to do with this data but please let me know if you think the shot setup history content is also useful. As I mentioned, there are also issues with shot setup history corruption but I might be able to repair some of that based on the contents of this contiguous log file

We need to investigate this data and consider how we can sensibly integrate this information.