[HTCondor-users] thoughts on HTCondor python bindings submit improvements

[John M Knoeller <johnkn@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I have been thinking about how to make HTCondor python bindings submit as capable as condor_submit,

 

The main thing missing right now is that the python bindings supports only the simplest possible queue statement.

I think that the bindings needs to support the full range of queue options, but in a pythonic way, so I’m thinking this

 

1. change the htcondor.Submit class so it can be constructed using the text of a valid submit file. like this

 

sub = hcondor.Submit(“””

                executable = /bin/echo

                queue 2 args in ( one, two, three )

                “””)

 

2. add a method to the htcondor.Submit class that lets you get an iterator from the queue itemdata, like this

 

for item in sub.itemdata() :

print item

 

which (given the submit file above) would print:

{‘args’ : ‘one’}

{‘args’ : ‘two’}

{‘args’ : ‘three’}

 

3. add a method to the htcondor.Submit class that would queue jobs to the schedd using an iterator for the queue itemdata.  like this

 

with schedd.transaction() as txn :

sub.queue_with_iter(txn, 2, iter(itemdata))

 

                which would submit 2 jobs for each item returned by the iterator.

The iterator could be sub.itemdata(), or any iterator that returned an equivalent type of item – either a dict, or a string.

 

The reason this would need to be a new queue method on the submit object is that the current queue method already

allows a third argument that is a list that is used to return the submitted job classads.   This would conflict with adding

an optional third argument to be the queue itemdata iterator.   Having a new method also allows the return type to be

change to be more pythonic – return a tuple of <clusterid,classad> for instance.

 

4. (optionally) change the current queue method on the htcondor.Submit object to honor any QUEUE statement supplied in the constructor of the Submit object.  It would be a runtime error to pass more than just the txn argument to the queue method in this case. (since the count argument would conflict)

 

Thoughts?

Is anyone currently using the third argument to the queue() method of the current htcondor.Submit class?

Would anyone be harmed if I just removed that argument and replaced it with an optional iterator?

 

-tj