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Hello,

We have a bug [1] that addresses the small semantical issue in names of the states for workflow and task executions: WAITING and DELAYED.
I’m really interested in your opinion about this. Especially native english speakers’ opinion because, IMO, they would be able to challenge better what we’re discussing.

Problem description

We now have a set of states:
IDLE  - Nothing is going on, object was just created
RUNNING - Workflow/task is running
PAUSED - Workflow/task has been paused
SUCCESS - Workflow/task has completed successfully
ERROR - Workflow/task has completed with an error
WAITING - Task execution object has been created but it is not ready to start because some preconditions were not met. For now it mostly refers to a case when we have a ‘join’ task depending on a number of other tasks, e.g. ‘task1’ depends on ‘task2’ and ‘task3’. But say ‘task2’ has completed and ‘task3’ has not and hence ‘task1’ has to wait. I may assume that in the future it may be related not only to joins.
DELAYED - Task has been delayed for a certain number of seconds. I may happen, for example, in case of using ‘retry’ policy.

So the semantical difference between WAITING and DELAYED is the following: Unlike WAITING, DELAYED says that we know exactly that the task will run, it’s just a matter of time. In case of WAITING, it may never run just because some of the preconditions may never be met.

And the concern is that we probably don’t use good names for WAITING and DELAYED because, from English language perspective, they look similar to a number of folks (including myself) and it’s therefore confusing if we look at two tasks with states WAITING and DELAYED.

The latest idea that we had is just to rename DELAYED to POSTPONED because the latter sort of expresses the fact of being postponed for a certain period of time slightly better :) But I’m really not sure.

Would appreciate your input on this.

Thanks

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/mistral/+bug/1470369 <https://bugs.launchpad.net/mistral/+bug/1470369>

Renat Akhmerov
@ Mirantis Inc.



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