Action item for change timeout proposal

[Mark Little <mark.little@arjuna.com>]

In the last teleconference I got an action item to further develop the 
proposal for changing the timeout associated with a "running" activity. 
I hope we're all now clear after the teleconference that the current 
setTimeout operation on the context service only changes the default 
timeout value associated with contexts created subsequently without the 
timeout parameter on begin?

With that in mind, the discussion we had centred on having a proposal 
for adding another operation to the context service that allows the 
timeout for an existing activity to be changed, but to say that 
referencing specifications MAY impose limitations on when it can be 
used. That proposal is what follows:

That we add an updateTimeout operation to the context service. This 
operation is contextualised, i.e., a valid context MUST be present with 
the message. The context service then changes the timeout associated 
with the context (which may be longer or shorter than the context's 
current timeout value). Because the timeout value MAY be mutable, we 
need to make it clear in the text that recipients of a context SHOULD 
NOT rely upon the value for making local optimisations (such as garbage 
collection) unless a referencing specification places limitations on 
how/when updateTimeout can be used (at the limit, even making the 
timeout value immutable).

Mark.

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fn:Mark Little
n:Little;Mark
email;internet:mark.little@arjuna.com
title:Chief Architect
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