book-pipeline reaches for colophon and bibfetch on every book it repairs.
Shelling out would mean a process per book per tool across five thousand
books, and parsing back the JSON it is about to parse anyway.
bibfetch's fetch loop lived in main.rs, so binding it meant either
lifting it or writing a second one. A second implementation of 'which
register answers about this kind of identifier, and in what order' would
drift from the first, and the copy nobody runs from a terminal would
drift silently. It is now bibfetch::ask, and the command line calls it
too — verified by running the CLI before and after and diffing.
fetch_identifier releases the GIL around the request. It is the only
function here that opens a socket, and holding the interpreter for the
length of an HTTP call would stop every other thread in it.
bibfetch is optional and only the python feature turns it on: its HTTP
client does not build for wasm32, and an unconditional dependency would
have taken the JavaScript package down with it.
An ISBN is not a DOI. The body that assigns a DOI is the only one that has
it, so one register is the whole answer. A book's identifier is assigned by
its publisher and recorded by whoever gets round to it, and the record that
comes back is as often as not missing the thing the caller wanted: asked
about 9780199205592, OpenLibrary's edition record names *The First World
War* and the press that printed it, and nobody at all as its author, because
an edition record names its authors by key.
So an ISBN now has a chain rather than a register. The edition record first,
then OpenLibrary's own index — which answers with `author_name` filled in
and costs nothing — and Google Books last, because it answers anonymous
callers only until a daily quota runs out, after which it replies 429 to
everyone behind the same address, as it is doing here today.
The first complete answer wins, an incomplete one is kept in case nothing
better comes, and a register being down is a failure only when every
register is. `source` on the record says which one answered.
colophon comes with it: the imprint reader was taking `Oxford is a
registered trade mark of Oxford University Press` for a publisher and
`Oxford N`, off `Oxford New York`, for a place. A legal notice mentioning a
press is not the press, and a city is the city and not the first letter of
the next one.
funkpower