launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Jonathan Lange <jml@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Jul 26, 2010 at 10:59 AM, Robert Collins
<robert.collins@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 26, 2010 at 11:53 AM, Jonathan Lange <jml@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> On Sat, Jul 24, 2010 at 10:08 AM, Robert Collins
>> <robert.collins@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> ...
>>> I need input here - where do people use len(), why do they use len(),
>>> what would the impact of nuking it be? We need this input to build
>>> better interfaces - ones that scale and perform well.
>>>
>>
>> As a webservice user, I use len() on collections to get an accurate
>> count of the number of things I care about, so I can plot them.
>>
>> In fact, just the other day someone asked me to make a public burndown
>> chart of the number of oops & timeout bugs in Launchpad. :P
>
> I think we can do something that will preserve your ability to do this
> broadly but not impose as heavily on us.
>
> A few initial thoughts:
>  - you're graphing absolute figures, you could get a delta and sum an
> arbitrary start point. E.g. if we said when you start the exercise
> 'hundreds of oops bugs' and then called you back with each bug that
> becomes an oops bug (or stops being one), you could track that
> hundreds down and requery the aggregate estimate whenever you like.
>  - or we could provide a 'delta aggregate' which would be pretty
> accurate (e.g. +4 today) even with the same precision limits the
> overall aggregates have
>  - we could issue an API key for users we're willing to serve exact figures to.
>  - we could provide a dedicated get-exact-figures interface, so that
> people really have to choose it - and further to that we can document
> our preferred interfaces.
>
> What do you think?

I prefer the last one. The first two would work, but seem a little
like they would make webservice users jump through hoops. A major goal
of the webservice is for it to be convenient and easy to use.

jml