Build fails during development due to Github API rate limits

[maxrothman]

If you're working on the guidelines and building somewhat frequently, the build sometimes fails with this error:

[java] Type error in expression in xsl:variable/@select on line 542 column 129 of functions.xsl:
     [java]   XTTE0570  An empty sequence is not allowed as the value of variable $login
     [java] In function tools:getContributors on line 466 column 61 of functions.xsl:
     [java] During lazy evaluation of (xsl:message, ...) on line 388 of file:/Users/maxrothman/repos/music-encoding/utils/guidelines_xslt/odd2html/functions.xsl
     [java] In function tools:generateIndizes on line 387 column 61 of functions.xsl:
     [java]      invoked by function call at file:/Users/maxrothman/repos/music-encoding/utils/guidelines_xslt/odd2html.xsl#218
     [java]   In template rule with match="/" on line 195 of odd2html.xsl
     [java] An empty sequence is not allowed as the value of variable $login

This is being caused by the Github API's rate limit while fetching contributors in this code:

music-encoding/utils/guidelines_xslt/odd2html/functions.xsl

Lines 467 to 468 in a4d4e3e

	<xsl:variable name="spec.repo.contributors" select="'https://api.github.com/repos/music-encoding/music-encoding/contributors'" as="xs:string"/>
	<xsl:variable name="docs.repo.contributors" select="'https://api.github.com/repos/music-encoding/guidelines/contributors'" as="xs:string"/>

This is an annoyance during development: the build already takes more than a minute, so having to wait a while and run it again is doubly annoying. It would be nice to remove these build failures, either by filtering out failed/empty responses, or by caching the results of those API calls locally.

[ahankinson]

Is there a way to set a development flag so that it only gets built on a “real” run?

[musicEnfanthen]

See #1471

For now, the only workaround is to wait some more minute, and run the build again. It's a bit annoying for sure, but hey... there are worse build times out there ;)

Saying this, I am still not 100% sure that it is really the API limit that triggers the build failures related to the empty $login, but let's see if something like #1471 improves the situtation.