Task chunking to amortize application and scene loading overhead

[mwiebe]

The first version of the Open Job Description specification supports a pattern to amortize loading overhead I'll call "task stickiness" here. Using a step environment, load an application in the background, and then have individual tasks give their parameters to the background application to run. This pattern is supported by the openjd-adaptor-runtime library.

Chunking frames together is another commonly supported solution for the same goal, and Open Job Description should support it too. The documentation covers how to use a combination expression to run multiple frames in a task. The discussion #49 proposes a nice improvement to allow that pattern with more intuitive job parameter inputs.

What the documented chunking pattern lacks is integration with the integer range expression that makes it easy to support both intervals of frames like "1-100" and pick up frames like "3,7-12,43". It would be great to add support for chunking that lets a job template author support the pattern for frames used in this Blender rendering sample but with the ability to specify a chunk size for the frames.

[mwiebe]

I've posted an RFC draft to #54 proposing how to do this. Looking for any feedback or comments. Do folks like the way I've framed it, and does the proposed solution look alright?

[mwiebe]

Following the RFC process, I've updated the status of #53 to rfc/final-comments. Please provide any additional feedback!

[mwiebe]

It's 8 days since entering the final comments period, and there's no remaining unaddressed discussions. I'm going to merge and take this RFC into the accepted-future status. See https://github.com/OpenJobDescription/openjd-specifications/tree/mainline/rfcs#6-final-comments-period to read more about the process.