Re: [Launchpad-users] Which Launchpad instance should launchpadlib access by default?

[Martin Pool <mbp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 9 February 2011 00:36, Leonard Richardson
<leonard.richardson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> I'll let Martin summarize his own position, but here's my stab at it:
>
> 1. Developers in general want to work against production, and printing this
> warning will just remind them to change it, which they will do immediately.
> 2. Making production the default everywhere maintains consistency between
> anonymous and authenticated access.
> 3. Other web service providers that publish client libraries don't have the
> client library go against a staging server by default.

Thanks for forwarding it; your summary is pretty close, but there are
some other points.

1- I'm not so convinced it should be on by default; most interfaces
default to 'actually do stuff' and then have a '--dry-run' option.
Just look at all the unix commands that have exactly that option,
whereas none that I can recall have an --actually-do-it.  ("Every gun
should be treated as if it's loaded.")

2- Expressing 'dry_run', whatever the default, by choosing a service
root url, is an abstraction inversion. If Launchpad later decides it
wants to, for instance, provide a web service on the production
instance that discards data, or to do away with the staging cluster,
or whatever, every lplib-using app will need to be updated.
Conversely, if lplib provides a 'dry_run' option then we would just
need to update lplib.

3- Having most apps explicitly give a URL means that lplib can't tell
whether the app actually has an opinion about which instance to use,
or if it just wants things to work. Knowing the difference could be
useful: for instance we could have an environment variable that lets
users change it without needing to build this into every single app;
or lplib could (hypothetically) choose a good URL at run time based on
the user's location; ...

> Again, please leave your comments in bug 714043 so we have a unified record
> of the discussion: https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpadlib/+bug/714043

Yep.  (The above are posted there.)

Thanks,
Martin