[DRMAA-WG] conf call minutes - Jan. 6th 2010

[Peter Tröger]

> I didn't noticed that I agreed to the Job/String duality.  The point
> about dealing with tens of thousands of jobs as Job objects being
> difficult may be true, but I'm not sure I like the idea of handling  
> them
> as String objects instead.  A better approach might be to offer some
> kind of aggregate object, like those silly opaque iterators from the C
> binding.
>
> I guess we need to look at use cases.  The only reason I can see that
> you'd want to wait for 10k jobs and actually look at the returned list
> of jobs, is if you have a list of jobs you launched, and you're  
> waiting
> for them to finish.  Since the job ids are opaque, you can't shortcut
> the job ids with math.  In order to keep a list of 10k jobs, even as
> String objects, you're going to have to take a clever approach.  If

Good point. From my knowledge, only scripting languages such as Python  
treat string as scalar data type. I still like the duality approach,  
but the reasoning is a little bit weak. We need to discuss that again.

> that you can find out the names of the jobs.  Heck, maybe job name
> should be part of the Job object directly.  In that kind of situation,
> an iterator would be exactly what you want, and it could be smart  
> enough
> not to keep all the Job objects alive at once.

Iterators are no concept in DRMAA so far, which is good. Mapping  
everything to C (in a nice way !) is already painful enough ....

Best,
Peter.