[saga-rg] Notes from meeting with BES and Byte-IO

[Tom Goodale]

Hi,

I had just had a meeting with the BES and Byte-IO people to check that we 
are all vaguely in sync.  The overall reception was postive, and there 
were a comments which came up when we were ging through things:

Namespaces:

getURL -> getCWD

   - as we are already talking about namespaces, and have the concept of a
     directory, URL was seen to be inappropriate here.  I've just thought
     why didn't we just name it getPath ?

Links aren't generic
   - could we move those off the generic namespace interface ?

RNS-Lite has a unified namespace.  (I guess this is similar to the GAT 
advert-service type namespace where any object could be stored.)  The 
suggestion was that SAGA should have one, and then there would be a 
namespace method which got the opaque token (EPR for RNS-Lite) which could 
be passed into the constructor of a file, etc; with isX methods to tell 
what sort of object was being pointed to by the opaque token.

   - this has obvious advantages in having just one namespace about, but
     does break the complete seperation of underlying implementation that
     we have currently, plus also requiring at least one call to
     instantiate an object, as currently have open methods which act as the
     appropriate factory methods to return files, logical files, etc.

Files:

writeP and readP are not described in the document.  Are they really 
distinct from the writeV and readV or just a subset of the functionality ?

Jobs:

Three more possible states were suggested

Staging In
Staging Out

Exception starting job (BES has this)

Contexts/sessions:

There was a suggestion that perhaps OGSA needs to pass generic context 
data about, sparked by the observation that SAGA and other systems do have 
the concept of a 'context';  would it make sense for SAGA for us to have 
sessions (or maybe all objects) provide the attribute interface and 
allow users to associate arbitrary key value pairs with it ?

Cheers,

Tom