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- Stale search indexes: the ALMA search index is re-built daily, so it should never be more than a day out of date: the VLA/VLBA/GBT search index is built less frequently and can be out of date by a week or more. We are working on it.
- Missing fields: the NRAO metadata database which we use to populate the search index spans four decades of observations, some of the observations have missing fields like array configuration or start and stop dates. We have no evidence of incorrect fields, just missing fields. There is no easy fix for the issue, we will have to extract each affected observation and update the database from the metadata in the files, we will start that after the software is released.
- Poor error feedback: there are many kinds of failures possible (observations that can't run through the calibration pipeline, observations that are missing some files, permissions errors writing files to user specified un-writable locations and so on), the AAT/PPI doesn't currently let the user know why something failed, and sometimes it won't let the user know it failed at all, requests never seem to complete. This is something we are actively working on.
- At this time only the calibration and flagging tables are downloadable after reprocessing, not the full calibrated measurement set.
- ALMA Cycle 0 and Cycle 1 observations are known to fail reprocessing, as are VLA observations before 2013, there is currently no feedback to the user that is the case. Users are advised to avoid reprocessing on these sets.
- GBT data delivery format: the SDFITS format for GBT data is not yet supported. GBT data can only be downloaded as a set of GBT-FITS files.
- The distributed applications that make up the AAT/PPI are fragile to database downtime, they don't recover well from it yet and have to be restarted to resume functioning: this is exacerbated by the fact that the system relies on several databases to work, not all of which are under the team's control. We are working to reduce the number of databases and to also make the system more robust.
Release Notes - 2.5.2 - 2017-05-04
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