[Piuparts-devel] Bug#649967: piuparts-slave - idle processing

[Dave Steele]

Package: piuparts
Version: 0.41
Severity: minor

The piuparts-slave application peeks into the master 'reserved'
directory to decide whether to idle or not between runs. If there are
no files found in that directory, then the program sleeps for
"idle-sleep" seconds before requesting more files from the master.

This has two problems. First, the lack of files in master's reserve
does not mean that there is no work available, only that there is no
work currently assigned to this (and any other) slave. Second, this
expects that the master reserve directory be visible to the slave.
This may not be true if the slave is remote.

As an alternative, Section.run() could return the number of packages
processed, and the main loop could sleep iff that number is 0,
indicating that the master had no work to assign.