I was bitten by the place-cover popup this night. On Friday I prepared to take darks. Capture asked me to cover the scope, which I don't care about. Clicked "don't show again" and dismissed. Night went doing darks in the observatory. Yesterday evening I took flats. Capture asked me for an evenly surface. DIDN'T click "don't show again" and dismissed. Took flats, then prepared Scheduler for NGC6888, then went to sleep. At midnight, Scheduler started, aligned, focused, etc, then Capture asked to remove the flat surface...

Capture is stubborn, so the pop-up remained until the morning.

But the most problematic issue is that when Capture asks that sort of thing, it has the capture state marked started. Thus meridian flip was not possible, although requested by Mount.

Fortunately I was awake at 5am (though I'd have preferred to be sleeping), and I suddenly heard the tock-tock of the scope hitting the pier.

So, should I be:
- adding an option to disable all such pop-ups from the Scheduler UI?
- adding a timeout to all such pop-ups when Scheduler is active?
- making Capture change its state AFTER such pop-up is dismissed?
- adding a warning to Scheduler when one of the blocking pop-ups is still marked to show up?

-Eric

One more popup to add: both my imaging setups are mobile (i.e. I need to take them down every morning and rebuild them next night) so I need to perform a polar alignment every time I want to image. It often happens that the (in my case north) celestial pole does not lie in the FOV and Ekos shows a popup to ask if you want to slew the telescope or not. Polar alignment will not continue until I click either Yes or No. I always choose No and I cannot disable the popup which I would very much like to be able to.

Having said that, are you sure that the popups you described only happen with the Scheduler? Do they not also happen in the Capture tab? If the answer is "Yes, they also happen in the Capture tab" then perhaps your first proposal is too restrictive. In any case, perhaps a similar configuration table as for under KStars -> Settings -> Configure Notifications could be a solution? That would allow a user to configure individual popups and enable or disable them as they please?

Regarding your second proposal: what would be the behaviour after the popup times out? Abort the scheduler? Continue with its operation as if nothing has happened? That latter may potentially be dangerous while the first could potentially waste a complete night...

Just my $0.02


Wouter

Indeed, the pop-ups I mentioned are displayed by the Capture module when it encounters a change of frame type.

Of course, the very straightforward solution is to run a flat, check and dismiss the pop-up, run a light, check and dismiss the pop-up, and do the same for darks (though I don't remember if checking the first pop-up does or doesn't automatically check the second).

But the next time settings are reset, fresh install or whatever, the trap will be fit once again.
This said, we need to make a difference between two types of pop-ups here: ones which asks for a choice, and ones which display a warning or create a pause. The second flavor can be auto-checked. I'm not sure the polar alignment question belongs to that family. But yeah an option to always choose the same answer could be interesting to optimize that time-costly procedure.

In my idea about the timed pop-up, the chosen item would be the acknowledge of the displayed text. "Please cover scope" would be validated as "scope now covered", like this. But that opens the question of how long should the pop-up wait, of course. My guess is that it is not a good solution to the problem anyway. The problem is that Scheduler running a sequence in the middle of the night expects everything to be configured already. Capture asking Scheduler to uncover the scope is just weird.

-Eric

So, am I correct in concluding that you prefer a configuration setting where the end user can enable or disable those popups? With the default behaviour that if an end user disabled the popup that the assumption is that the user meant "this situation is under control and the popup can be disabled because I know what I am doing and I guarantee that there is no problem"? With that last bit I meant that if the Capture module would normally ask for you to remove a flat panel, that when the user disables that, the user guarantees that the flat panel was removed. If yes, then I agree


Wouter

Yes my opinion is that because those pop-ups can be dismissed forever, and that they are blocking, a non-interactive procedure should be able to bypass them one way or the other.

The argument I'd like to also hear about is whether some end-users have a need for the automated procedure to block on certain queries or warnings.

And this can be the place to discuss whether some other pop-ups could be made one-time only by updating the request they make towards the end-user, such as the polar alignment question you talked about.

-Eric

I would opt for a timeout - maybe configurable somewhere - for all popups. We work intensively in making KStars a tool for observatory automation. In an automated world, popups requiring manual interaction do not make sense.

- Wolfgang