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catrope@svn.wikimedia.org wrote:
Revision: 35081 Author: catrope Date: 2008-05-20 09:16:01 +0000 (Tue, 20 May 2008)
Log Message:
Unified aiprop and iiprop somewhat by adding iiprop=mime and
Woohoo!
Hmm, I do notice though...
In order to get any particular property, I have to ask for it explicitly. But if I ask for any property the server doesn't recognize, the whole request gets rejected with an error message:
"code": "iiunknown_iiprop", "info": "Unrecognised value for parameter 'iiprop'",
This isn't very friendly to progressive enhancement / graceful degredation.
For instance, I might want to be able to use both foreign repos that are running 1.12 (in which case I have to guess MIME type on my end) *and* those running 1.13 (in which case I can get the type from the server).
The simplest way would be to say "give me the mime type, if you've got it" and if I don't get it back, just interpolate it and use all the rest of the data.
But since I don't get *any* data back when I do this, I'd have to jump through some hoops:
* Try with mime, then when it fails try a second request without -- high overhead to connect to old versions unless we cache the failover information.
* Request a list of supported properties from the server -- I'm unclear on whether this is even available. Again, we'd have to cache that info to get efficient queries.
* Require the site admin to specify the remote server's support when configuring the repo -- extra administrative overhead, and won't get the enhancement when the foreign site is upgraded.
- -- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)