Here is a sample feed xml. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<feed name="rawEmailFeed" description="Raw customer email feed" xmlns="uri:falcon:feed:0.1">
<tags>externalSystem=USWestEmailServers</tags>
<groups>churnAnalysisDataPipeline</groups>
<frequency>hours(1)</frequency>
<timezone>UTC</timezone>
<late-arrival cut-off="hours(1)"/>
<clusters>
<cluster name="primaryCluster" type="source">
<validity start="2015-10-30T01:00Z" end="2015-10-30T10:00Z"/>
<retention limit="hours(10)" action="delete"/>
</cluster>
</clusters>
<locations>
<location type="data" path="/user/ambari-qa/falcon/demo/primary/input/enron/${YEAR}-${MONTH}-${DAY}-${HOUR}"/>
<location type="stats" path="/"/>
<location type="meta" path="/"/>
</locations>
<ACL owner="ambari-qa" group="users" permission="0x755"/>
<schema location="/none" provider="/none"/>
</feed>
In the above example, the validity time is "the time interval when the feed is valid on this cluster". After the validity time ends, falcon is not expected to perform any operations on the feed. The retention job for this feed will be run from validity start time up to validity end time, and will delete any feed instances older than 10 hours. You are correct when you say that some instances of Feed will never be deleted. In the above example, feed instances at between 2015-10-30T00:00Z and 2015-10-30T10:00Z will never be deleted. If you are expecting all feed instances to be deleted after retention time limit, Falcon should change the way it creates retention coordinator job. I opened a Jira https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FALCON-1644 for this.
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