RFC: Removal of the auto refresh feature

[Daniel Beck]

Hi everyone,

I recently opened a PR to core, removing the 'auto refresh' feature, with accompanying explanation:

https://github.com/jenkinsci/jenkins/pull/2979

If you care one way or the other, please comment there. Initial feedback was supportive, so this will probably go into 2.76 unless there are objections.

Thanks!
Daniel

[R. Tyler Croy]

(replies inline)

I am strongly in favor of removing this unfeature :D



- R. Tyler Croy

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[Ullrich Hafner]

Since you are removing a (IMO very often used) feature: shouldn’t you better ask the users than the developers?

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[Daniel Beck]

> On 21. Aug 2017, at 23:02, Ullrich Hafner <ullrich...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Since you are removing a (IMO very often used) feature: shouldn’t you better ask the users than the developers?

Users who don't use it won't really care one way or the other, so shouldn't really be motivated to respond. Users who use it will, and are likely to complain. What would that even mean in terms of total user base? Is that a vocal, tiny minority, or actually representative of a significant part of Jenkins users? How would I interpret any response that's not in favor?

On top of that, this is a feature trivial to do in a plugin, or in a generic browser extension. And if there's an unexpectedly large angry mob with torches and pitchforks showing up next week, we could always revert it (or, more likely, create a plugin that does this).

It's too bad we don't have "usage stats" for this cookie. I've considered adding usage stats for specific system properties in the past, maybe it's time for something like that.

[Jesse Glick]

On Tue, Aug 22, 2017 at 6:07 AM, Daniel Beck <m...@beckweb.net> wrote:
> we could always revert it (or, more likely, create a plugin that does this)

IIUC you could not create a plugin which does it as well, since the
`isAutoRefresh` calls have been removed, and possibly also
`norefresh="true"` markers (as I queried in the PR). So any such
plugin would probably have to add the refresh (mis)feature to URLs (or
Stapler ancestor tails, whatever) which have been explicitly
whitelisted as safe to refresh, such as folder index pages (with some
tricks to deal with `editDescription` which does not change the page
URL).