Should you be able to upload nothing? 🤷

[colinbrislawn]

Steps to Reproduce:

pacifica-cli upload --proposal 000
Note how the positional argument FILES is missing.

Expected Result:

The lack of FILES argument is probably a mistake on the users part, so an error is thrown.

Actual Result:

The uploader diligently uploads an empty record. For example: https://status.datahub.pnl.gov/view/679

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IDK if this is a feature or a bug. I would like to be able to upload files with zero size (representing empty samples), but uploading nothing at all seems strange to me. I'm going to put another shrugging emoji here 🤷

[dmlb2000]

The idea is that the CLI uploader can be used to add metadata as a transaction if required. Empty files are problematic for an archive file system as they take metadata space without using the data space.

Archive systems often advertise how they can support 100 Petabytes of data. This space is for the data which is separate from file and directory names and their relationships (the metadata).

I understand how flag files are useful for handling state of workflow in a file system working space. However, that behavior doesn't translate well to archive systems. It would be better to use key value pair metadata to store that state and just upload nothing.

There is an open issue pacifica/pacifica-cartd#58 that discusses what it would be to add additional metadata to a download. With this feature you could use the CLI downloader to download just the metadata specified with an empty transaction. This would be useful as it allows users to have a consistent set of tooling to download and upload {meta}data.