[graap-wg] proposal: agreement lifecycle end-games

[Jon MacLaren]

Good to see a thorough consideration of the lifetime issue.  Other than 
agreeing entirely with dropping the terminate stuff for now, I just 
wanted to comment on one of the points you made:

On Mar 22, 2005, at 1:53 AM, Karl Czajkowski wrote:

> ...
> F. Should we introduce any kind of "linger" time to indicate an
>    interaction with WS-ResourceLifetime to commence an automatic
>    countdown to Agreement destruction once it has reached the Complete
>    or PostObserved state?

It may be OK to "garbage collect" the agreement after all the terms 
have successfully completed.  But where one or more terms have been 
violated, the initiator will want to be able to point at the agreement 
for an arbitrary length of time afterwards.  They may wish to seek 
compensation through some out-of-bands methods.

Let me give a motivating use-case.

Lets say that something goes wrong with the execution of my job.  
Perhaps we'd agreed that it would execute at 4pm, but it didn't start 
until 4.30pm.  I am offered a partial refund, but want to argue for 
more.  I'll do this by email, but will want to refer to the agreement 
in some way...

Lifetime management for this sort of thing is hard.

>
> karl
>

Jon.