Re: [Mediawiki-api] Perl MediaWiki::API module

On Tue, Jun 24, 2008 at 01:05:19PM +0100, Jools Smyth wrote: Ironically, I also have a Perl module named Mediawiki::API at svn co svn://hemlock.ts.wikimedia.org/cbm/subversion/mediawiki-api Mine is somewhat more complete in terms of queries, but I don't have editing support written yet. Perhaps we can work together to make a single library. I have been planning to work on rewriting mine (it was originally proof-of-concept code, and significant reorganization is needed). My library is field-tested in VeblenBot and the WP 1.0 bot on enwiki. I'll be glad to dual-license my code in both GPL and the Perl license. I noticed your library is not very robust about handling errors from the API. I have found through experience that the following error situations have to be expected and handled when dealing with the API: 0. The server may be temporarily unavailable, or the DNS may temporarily fail to resolve. This is true for any web-based service. The query has to be repeated if the server is temporarily unavailable. 1. The squids may return an error message, which is marked by an HTTP 'x-squid-error' header. This means the query must be repeated. 2. You will quite routinely get a 0 byte response with a sucessful HTTP status code. This means the query must be repeated. 3. You need to use a maxlag= parameter, and detect when the maxlag is exceeded. If it is exceeded, the query must be repeated after the appropriate delay. 4. Rarely, you may get a truncated XML response, which causes the XML parser to throw an exception. This means the query must be repeated. You can see this error handling in the poorly named 'makeHTMLrequest' and 'makeXMLrequest' functions in my API.pm. These should be 'makeHTTPrequest' and 'makeXMLrequest', respectively. - Carl