Eyal´s answer to question on which features to include / exclude (email 09.03.2009 10:39 to WP5 list)
WHICH FEATURES?
- INCLUDE (serious implementation)
- parallel: otherwise you cannot scale
- distributed: otherwise you ignore the problem
- data access: because it is tied to 'distribution'
- interoperability: otherwise the plugin concept is useless
- plugin registration: otherwise you have no plugins
- instrumentation: otherwise you cannot choose plugins
- anytime behaviour (= incompleteness): otherwise plugins cannot scale
- data caching: otherwise the platform is stupid
- computing resources: we should provide the framework, not the hardware
- code library: we should provide the above and nothing else
So my opinion: the latter two we can ignore for now; the middle five we should do as minimally as possible (for a start); the first three are both our opportunity and weakness (we need them but haven't much progress yet).
Plugin registration module can be as simple as a wiki page with a list of endpoints, which can be consulted by Angus the pipeline configurator. Instrumentation can be as simple as a log file. Data caching can be as simple as a caching proxy (eg Squid or Memcached).
I'm not saying these topics are trivial, but I think we should pick the most trivial solution to them (which solves only the general case) and then focus on: running distributed parallel plugins.