What on earth is a supernode? (and should we remove it)

[thesuperzapper]

Currently, there is a completely undocumented feature called "supernode", which can be created by right-clicking a pipeline node.

I really don't understand the value of the feature, and given how many issues are related to it, we might consider removing it.

Screenshot of creating supernode:

ISSUE 1: you cant connect a node inside a supernode to a node outside the supernode

• Supernode/subflows are not working properly #2196
• Can't connect a standard node with a node within a supernode #839

ISSUE 2: when you go into a supernode you get a very glitchy black box that hovers over the palate selector and flickers in and out of existence

ISSUE 3: when you delete a supernode from a pipeline, the entire canvas UI disappears until you reopen that pipeline tab

[ajbozarth]

Note #2246 is also a super node issue

Also after many discussions with the team about this over the last 6 months I will be removing super node support from the pipeline-editor canvas instance, but none of our other functionality. This would be a form of deprecation. If we find that users come back wondering where the support has gone then we can easily turn it back on and attempt to fix the bugs, but if after some time we see no issue we can remove the backend support for super nodes such as validation.

[lresende]

Can we leave them a little bit more or add an option to enable/disable them? I might have some ideas to user super node.

[ajbozarth]

Per further discussion (including @lresende) I plan to look into making super node enabled/disabled a setting that we can then default to off. Given the now larger size of this work I may not start this work immediately. If someone else want to tackle this feel free to ping this issue to check in if I've started work.

[ajbozarth]

I've added this to the 3.8 sprint for now so we can discuss it when we sprint plan in 2 Mondays