Investigate removing TEAL

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Issue HLA-1208 was created on JIRA by Steve Goldman:

This ticket would deprecate and then remove the TEAL interface from new versions of drizzlepac. After discussing this with Nadia, we agreed that this should be done as the current code is not maintainable. 

The change would also require altering some current regression tests that use TEAL to create configuration files. 

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Comment by Matthew Burger on JIRA:

Asked on slack in #python, #research, and #hst_pipeline_meeting for people to let me know if they use TEAL.

Results:

• Alyssa Pagan

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Comment by Matthew Burger on JIRA:

Chris Sontag:  Awww.  I wrote that a bunch of years ago.  No idea who maintains it now.  Thought it was dead.

 
Marc Rafelski: I sometimes use it as a quick way to look at different options to change. I could use the documentation instead, but I'm used to that being a quick way. I wouldn't keep it around for my use cases.
 

[s-goldman]

As a part of this effort, the documentation will have to be updated #1439.

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Comment by Michele De La Pena on JIRA:

This issue needs some initial investigation as the underlying code which reads the default configuration files, performs type checking, and controls which parameters work in tandem with one another (i.e., turn "off" parameter one which then disables parameters six and seven as they are no longer applicable) is valuable and would potentially require a lot of re-write.  Is it just the actual GUI which is not maintainable?

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Comment by Steve Goldman on JIRA:

Along the line of what Michele mentioned is that the teal.teal command could be removed, while we keep the teal.load commands for the backend parsing type checking, and rules within the cfg parameter files.

These would otherwise have to be converted to json, and then we would have to create new rules elsewhere in the code to compensate for the teal loads; this seems like more work than it is worth if teal.load can remain.

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Comment by Michele De La Pena on JIRA:

@⁣sgoldman
When closing a ticket with Done or Cancel, please add comment regarding what was done or why it is being closed. You can reference a GitHub ticket as appropriate.

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Comment by Steve Goldman on JIRA:

Thanks for the reminder! An initial attempt to remove TEAL has been created in PR 1759 more testing will be needed. 

In order to share this change with users, we should add documentation about the Legacy TEAL GUI, and share the change with something like a MAST newsletter or STAN. Mitchel Revalski also suggested providing a YML file or a list of the most current package versions that will work with TEAL for anyone that still wants to use the GUI. 

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Comment by Michele De La Pena on JIRA:

Steve Goldman
Once the "hiding of the TEAL GUI" is fully tested, I can tell the ACS and WFC3 Teams and request they add this information to their STANs. Once we make a release of drizzlepac with this change, then we will define the last version of drizzlepac which worked with the TEAL GUI. Pardon, but I do no know...are there other packages which used TEAL?

Please write a ticket so we remember to notify the INS teams regarding the official deprecation of the TEAL GUI starting at version n.n.n of drizzlepac. It can be suggested they announce this in their STANs.

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Comment by Steve Goldman on JIRA:

Sounds good. I know at least one package that still uses TEAL is stsci.skypac. Drizzlepac still prints out a shorter TEAL message when you import drizzlepac because stsci.skypac is a dependency.