🚀 Autogenerate Sample Data from Sample Manifests

[keithrfung]

Is there an existing issue for this?

• I have searched the existing issues

Suggestion

There are a couple problems with Sample Data that we would like to address.

1. The sample data being out of date from the SDK
2. Storing all the manifest sample data files within this repository

Possible Implementation

The large collection of sample data should be removed in favor of using the code to generate samples.

• Retain only the sample manifests in the repository
• Delete other folders all the sample data
• Create a generate_sample workflow for specifically handling the sample data updates allowing for the Specification to be released WITHOUT the sample data since the code has to update for it to be generated.
• Import the electionguard package from python to generate the sample data on the release workflow
• Ensure the release data is zipped and possibly tarballed (🗂 Package Sample Data as tarball for Linux users #216 ) and attached to releases
• Update the Sample Data document. It should mention the same things but refer to the releases and the sample manifests instead of the individual files.

Anything else?

This is currently blocked until electionguard-python 1.4 is released.

This issue replaces #215 to include more detail.

[keithrfung]

This should handle #219 when complete to ensure this can't repeat itself.

[shivbijlani]

Hi @R-C-Stewart , Keith says that this is blocked until v1.4 is released. I dont see any technical reason for this to be blocked, and Keith did remove the blocked label on Feb 21. Can you confirm that this is unblocked.

[SteveMaier-IRT]

@shivbijlani, This can be worked on now. The python CLI has code to do generation of plain text ballots. At the time that this was labeled as blocked the cli did not generate ballots from a manifest yet.