Allow executions to have some kind of name/label

[ldaley]

Something like Execution.current().name("doing-stuff")

[tomdcc]

Would definitely be helpful for the name to be available in an initializer, so that other code that wants to populate its registry in an initializer has access to the name. So should be on ExecSpec as well to allow Execution.fork().name("foo").

[ldaley]

The only thing really stopping us doing this is deciding whether a single opaque string is good enough. Some alternatives might be:

1. Arbitrary object (expected to have a reasonable toString())
2. Map<String,String>

I am leaning towards a simple String name property though.

[tomdcc]

Me too. Pretty easy to imagine an arbitrary (and mutable) descriptor object being abused instead of just putting stuff in the registry. Easy enough to call .name(constructDescriptor('foo', 123, 'bar)) if you need something more structured.

[ldaley]

Yeah, let's just settle on a single CharSequence property. That leaves the door a little open for someone to do something fancy. I think we should call this property identifier or label.

It should go on ExecSpec and default to N, where that is the _N_th execution forked from that execution. Each Execution can maintain a counter for this and ExecControllerInternal can provide a counter for top level executions.

Anyone want volunteer to implement?

[tomdcc]

I'm happy to but can't promise anything over the next couple of weeks.