launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Robert Collins <robertc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Apr 12, 2012 at 5:31 PM, Ian Booth <ian.booth@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Oh, so that's why I couldn't find the bug - I was looking in bugs for
> the launchpadlib project. I had no idea the wadllib project even
> existed. And why I kept saying to myself "what bug?".

Yes, the layers there aren't clearly spelt out.

> Various conversations around fixing the problem without introducing
> another client collection seemed to lead to having to modify
> launchpadlib and the wadl generation amongst other things, and seemed
> much more involved/complicated than the original proposal. Given that
> advice and my lack of previous exposure to the vagaries of wadl
> generation et al, it is a distraction since my main aim is to get the
> disclosure work finished and this stuff is at this stage more of a nice
> to have from that perspective.

It's true that its not directly what you want to achieve. And in fact
choosing when to shave yaks and when to bulldoze in a straight line is
one of the 4 unsolved problems in computer engineering (the other ones
being cache coherency and boundary conditions :))

That said, the situation here, as I see it is:
 - there is a known defect *in our stack*
 - if that defect was fixed, your scenario would work (the collection
would naturally DTRT)
 - fixing the defect should not be particularly large or onerous, for
all that it may be unfamiliar territory.

And you're proposing to not fix the defect, but instead propogate a workaround.

This doesn't make sense to me, it keeps the cost of maintenance and
ongoing development higher.

If the cost of fixing the underlying defect was going to be very high,
it would be a different matter.

-Rob