Each Account may have one Focus, a Project whose Jobs go first

• Amends: ADR-0025’s “there is no priority field”

Context

ADR-0025 made the queue FIFO with no priority field, and put urgency in owl queue reorder. That rejected priority tiers for their inflation: once three things are first, nothing is.

Reordering is a one-off, though. Moving api’s Jobs to the front does nothing for the api Job queued tomorrow, which lands at the back. When one Project has a deadline, keeping it first means reordering after every enqueue.

Decision

A Focus is a Project marked to go first on its Account. Each Account has at most one, and it is standing until cleared.

It orders, it does not filter. The scheduler scans focused Projects’ Jobs first, then everything else, each part oldest first. A focused Project with nothing runnable - blocked, at its Account’s Ceiling, at a cap - holds nothing up: the rest of the queue runs as it would have.

Focused Jobs go ahead of unfocused Jobs on any Account. Where the global cap binds (ADR-0021), a focused Job on one Account starts before an older unfocused Job on another. Two Accounts’ focused Projects take turns oldest first.

It is daemon state, not configuration. owl focus <project> sets it for that Project’s Account, owl focus clear -a <account> clears it, and owl focus lists it. Focusing another Project on the same Account moves it, and says so. It is cleared when its Project is removed or configured onto another Account.

Consequences

• A standing Focus is the priority ADR-0025 declined, confined to one Project per Account. One per Account is what keeps it from inflating: there is no second rank to promote something to.
• owl status has to say when a Job was started ahead of an older one because of Focus, as it already says when a Job was skipped.
• A Focus left on keeps its Project first for weeks. That is its meaning, and why owl focus and the desktop app show it wherever the queue is shown.
• It needs no Shift and no Idle of its own: it orders whatever work is allowed.

Alternatives considered

Focus as a filter, so only its Project runs. Leaves the machine idle while work is runnable, which ADR-0025 rejected for strict head-of-line ordering.

One Focus for the whole daemon. Simpler, and wrong for a person who runs separate Accounts for separate clients side by side.

Several ranked Focuses per Account. The priority tiers ADR-0025 rejected, under another name.

Focus in the daemon’s config file. Beside the Ceiling and caps, and wrong for something flipped during the day: config describes the setup, commands own the state.

Focus only within its Account, leaving FIFO across Accounts. Then focusing a Project does not make it next whenever the global cap binds.