UPLOADER: "Unchanged" files always marked for re-upload (Schroedinger's GIS)

[MattReimer]

TL;DR: Opening files in QGIS changes them.

Symptoms

The symptom of a project is as follows:

1. User downloads a big project
2. User loads said project using "Riverscapes Viewer"
3. User does not make any changes to the project
4. User clicks the "Upload" menu item
5. Geopackages are marked for upload to the server

What is causing this?

This happens because when the user opens a project the Business Logic dictates that some files (usually geopackages and rasters) are opened, read and added to the project tree.

This act of reading them changes the MD5 hashes of the file (which is a terrible side-effect but a common problem in the GIS world).

Why this really sucks

1. If all the user did was change the metadata or a smaller file in the project, the user will have to upload the entire project (or at least every file the businesslogic touches) again.
2. This is a waste of time and bandwidth and could end up costing us $$$ if the uploader is used
3. There is no way to get to the upload dialog without opening the project. This means there is no way to avoid this problem (in QGIS anyway, people using the rscli tool can avoid this problem).
4. This precludes this tool (for now anyway) from being useful to make lots of little changes to many projects, especially larger projects.

@philipbaileynar put some notes in the docs about this: https://viewer.riverscapes.net/software-help/help-qgis-uploader/ (see notes at the bottom)

How could we fix this in the future

• We could decouple the upload dialog from the rest of QRave somehow so you don't need to load a project to upload it.
• We could find a new way to ensure files haven't been changed using a combination of other properties like filesizes or other metadata we keep track of. (this is not a good idea but mentioned for completeness)
• Do some reasearch into why QGIS is changing these files and figure out how to turn that off. This one is a long shot
• ???