Greetings,
We (a development team at Canonical) are stumbling into a situation
here which I'd be curious to understand what is the general practice,
since I'm sure this is somewhat of a common issue.
It's quite easy to describe it: say there's a parent node A somewhere
in the tree. That node was created dynamically over the course of
running the system, because it's associated with some resource which
has its own life-span. Now, under this node we put some control nodes
for different reasons (say, A/B), and we also want to track some
information which is related to a sequence of nodes (say, A/C/D-0,
A/C/D-1, etc).
So, we end up with something like this:
A/B
A/C/D-0
A/C/D-1
The question here is about best-practices for taking care of nodes
like A/C. It'd be fantastic to be able to create A's structure
together with A itself, otherwise we risk getting in a situation where
a client can see the node A before its "initialization" has been
finished (A/C doesn't exist yet). In fact, A/C may never exist, since
it is possible for a client to die between the creation of A and C.
Anyway, I'm sure you all understand the problem. The question here
is: this is pretty common, and quite boring to deal with properly on
every single client. Is there any feature in the roadmap to deal with
this, and any common practice besides the obvious "check for
half-initialization and wait for A/C to be created or deal with
timeouts and whatnot" on every client?
I'm about to start writing another layer on top of Zookeeper's API, so
it'd be great to have some additional insight into this issue.
--
Gustavo Niemeyer
http://niemeyer.net
http://niemeyer.net/blog
http://niemeyer.net/twitter
