UWS PENDING Destruction Time can be immediate

[Paul Harrison]

On 2014-11 -10, at 20:23, Walter Landry <wlandry at caltech.edu> wrote:

> Hello Everyone,
> 
> Following the discussion earlier about the use of PENDING in UWS, I
> looked at the spec more closely.  If I understand correctly, a service
> is allowed to assign a Destruction Time of 'right now' for any job
> that does not have PHASE=RUN attached.  This would effectively remove
> PENDING as a possible state, simplifying implementation.  Is this
> really OK?  Am I missing something?
> 

You are right that you are “allowed" to do that (servers are allowed to set destruction times as they want), but if you did then a UWS client would conclude that you would never run any jobs. Remember that the default way of creating a job is to POST the JDL  - with no control parameters, allowing the PHASE=RUN is a specific extension to the normal way of creating jobs that was added as a convenience (and I rather regret having allowed this now as I knew that it would cause problems - as it broke the clean separation that used to exist between JDL and job control). So a UWS server *should* behave in a way that is consistent, whether the PHASE=RUN is included in the original POST or done as a separate operation in a subsequent control POST.

Cheers,
	Paul.