[drmaa-wg] Summary of Unsupported Attribute Error Discussion

[Daniel Templeton]

In the introspective world, attributes are set via individual getters 
and setters.  In order to handle the optional attributes, an 
UnsupportedAttributeException is needed to indicate that a given 
optional attribute is not supported.

In the non-introspective world, get getter and setter functions 
currently *may* return an invalid argument error if a given attribute is 
not supported.  Since this is a very overloaded error code, it would be 
helpful to introduce the unsupported attribute error from the 
introspective spec.  It was agreed that the new error code would make 
sense, but only if an implementation is not required to return that 
error code for unsupported attributes.  Additionally, if that error code 
is returned, the job template must remain unchanged by the call.

There are concerns that, by making support of the error code optional, 
we're diverging the behavior of the introspective and non-introspective 
specs.  A question was also raised as to the ultimate disposition of the 
IDL spec.

Daniel