step skipping oddities

[stscieisenhamer]

Skipping a step currently does not completely skip a step. The following actions still occur, though there does not seem any clear reason why they should. Basically all actions that would occur surrounding step execution still occur, regardless of whether the step itself is executed.

• results saving fixed in Not saving step results if step is skipped jwst#944
  Documented in steps still save results if skipped jwst#941
• pre/post hooks still are executed
  Though guessing unused, one can configure to have pre/post actions occur. Not clear this is intuitive.
• Meta information is updated. In particular CRDS context and version, and software version and commit version.
• Argument checking. Checking args on something not done?

Unless otherwise indicated, will consider making step skipping a bit more inclusive to not include the above operations.

[melanieclarke]

@braingram - I know you were working on step skipping consistency recently (#195). Do you know if any of these issues with skipping steps are still relevant?

[braingram]

I believe the unresolved issues are still unresolved (but would have to dig in to confirm) so for a skipped step:

• pre/post hooks still are executed
• Meta information is updated. In particular CRDS context and version, and software version and commit version.
• Argument checking. Checking args on something not done?

[melanieclarke]

Okay, thank you. Can we transfer this ticket to stpipe, then?